


Field of Coltsfoot and Bramble

by Foxwine



Series: Back to the Fold [1]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Blood and Injury, Gen, PTSD, Panic Attacks, Soldier 76 is having a Day, Swearing, brief appearance by Bastion, brief appearance by Zenyatta, brief appearance of McGenji, perhaps not the most reliable of narrators
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-07
Updated: 2018-12-04
Packaged: 2019-08-20 00:17:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 35,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16545107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Foxwine/pseuds/Foxwine
Summary: After an attempted one-man raid goes sour on him, Soldier 76 suddenly finds out that he is not the only one still using the old Overwatch safe-houses anymore.





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

> A grateful and well-deserved thank you is due to my beloved and indispensable sounding-board Demolition, without whom my writing would certainly make a great deal less sense than it does.

As Soldier Seventy-Six all but staggered along the street, keeping to the shadows as much as he could, he was more than grateful for the urge that had led him to case the former Overwatch safehouse that he had remembered being in the area before embarking on his planned raid on a small Talon outpost just outside town.

His spectacularly failed attempted raid on a Talon outpost that was actually much larger than he had anticipated, as it turned out.

Getting away at all had been lucky. Getting away with only one major but not crippling injury and without leaving a blood trail leading straight to the fortunately still active safehouse that he had cased and left his supplies in before heading to the outpost was close to being a miracle. One that Soldier had no intention of looking at too closely lest it evaporate.

The safehouse was tucked into the basement of a building housing a restaurant, and Soldier hissed quietly to himself as each step down the stairs jogged his Heavy Pulse Rifle against the bundled-up towel that he had stolen from a washing line and stuffed under his jacket and pressed it further into his wound. Still, being in pain was a world better than being dead — or worse, being captured by Talon.

Someday, maybe he would understand why shrapnel seemed to be so unnaturally attracted to his kidneys.

Soldier keyed in the pass-code on the panel at the bottom of the stairs, which his visor’s computer had calculated for him earlier that day based on the old code protocols he had remembered. The small screen above it lit up as he finished, showing the words ‘Code Recognized. Last Entry: 9h53m’. Soldier nodded to himself; the time matched when he had left the safehouse earlier exactly. He had taken a lot longer to get back than he had expected to when he’d left, slowed down by his injury as well as by taking a more circuitous, doubled back route than he had originally planned to in order to make sure that he was not being followed. He swung the door open and went inside, making sure to firmly close it all the way again behind him before he reached for the light switch.

It was a small safehouse, one of the ones set up for Blackwatch’s tiny mobile response teams as far as he had been able to remember, with room for no more than four agents and their gear at most, a little dusty but miraculously still habitable, and with copious amounts of hot water thanks to the restaurant’s high-capacity heater. The electric kettle that had been left in the pathetic excuse for a kitchenette had even worked when he tested it. Listening to the door locks re-engaging behind him, Soldier let a little of the tension humming through his body ease away. He would be safe here for long enough to let his enhanced healing knit him back together. It was a pleasant thought.

The thought of healing around the sharp-edged shrapnel he could feel knifing into him under the towel pressed to his side, leaving the foreign material more or less permanently embedded in his back and side was far less pleasant. He sighed, and shuffled across the room to fill the electric kettle and set it to boil. While it heated up, he went and dug into one of the bags he had left in the bedroom for his medical kit, then searched through the kitchenette’s two meagre cupboards for a bowl which he then cleaned out at the sink. He deposited the med-kit and the bowl in the bathroom, which thankfully had a floor-to-ceiling mirror next to the shower. After turning so that his injured flank faced the mirror and craning his neck a bit to see how well he could see it, he sighed again and headed back to the bedroom for his shaving kit, which had a small mirror in it that could be propped up.

As he was heading back to the bathroom with the shaving mirror, the kettle started to squeal, so he diverted to grab it as well. Setting it and the mirror with the other supplies, he removed the Pulse Rifle from his back and leaned it next to the door. He moved over to the shower before he unzipped his jacket, letting the blood-sodden towel stuffed inside it splat into the shower tray instead of onto the floor.

Ignoring his still bleeding wound for the moment, he removed his jacket entirely and turned it to survey the damage. On the outside, it looked remarkably good. There were a few new bullet scores, but otherwise the only major damage was where a high calibre round from what had probably been a rifle had slammed into him as he was making his escape, the reinforced leather marked with a scorched asterisk with a hole in the centre where it had been hit. The inside of the jacket was a different matter. He had noticed a few weeks earlier that the inner lining that held the jacket’s ceramic metal armour plates was getting a bit worn and would be needing replacing soon, and that had become his downfall with a single lucky shot from some Talon lackey. The bullet had hit the seam between two plates, and they had both shattered, slicing through the worn lining fabric and embedding shards of the thin plating deep in his flesh.

It was hard to tell from looking at the damage to his jacket alone whether the bullet had made it all the way through or not, given that the lining was shredded and soaked with his blood. Soldier hoped that it had not. Bullet fragments were hard to get a grip on with tweezers at the angle he was going to have to work from and just jostling them around in his muscle would do much more harm than leaving them be, unlike the sharp-edged shards of what had been his armour.

He set the jacket against the wall by his pulse rifle, and set about unstrapping and taking off his knives in their wrist sheaths, laying them down carefully where they would be in reach while he was working, just in case. Then, with a snarl for the pulling, shifting, slicing pain the gesture caused him, he pulled off his ruined compression shirt and dropped it carelessly on top of the towel in the shower. With that taken care of, he undid his belt and leaving it to dangle loosely, lowered himself to sit on the floor, his wounded flank facing the mirror. The injury was high enough on his body to be dealt with without having to remove his pants at least, though they were also badly bloodstained and starting to get uncomfortably tacky as the blood on them dried.

Then, and only then, he finally took off his mask and visor, laying them carefully aside before unlatching the neck mount and putting it down with them. Rubbing the back of his newly uncovered neck tiredly with one hand, he used the other to pour some of the boiled water in the kettle into the bowl he had found.

It took a little shuffling and manoeuvring, but before long he was using his med-kit tweezers to dig shards of his broken armour plates out of his flesh while watching himself in his shaving mirror. It was fiddly, slow work as he found shards as much by feeling them out as by seeing them in the mirrors, pausing every now and then to wipe away the blood welling from the wound with a thick pad of gauze and rinse off the tweezers with the boiled water. He was very thankful throughout for his unnatural flexibility — one of the things that he had gained from what the SEP had done to him in his previous life — without which the task would have been practically back-breaking if not completely impossible to perform on himself.

After an hour and thirty-nine minutes of tweezer-work, wiping, and occasional careful stretching to keep from developing a crick from his awkward position, Solder decided that he had found and removed as much of the shrapnel as he was going to be able to. Whatever was left, he was just going to have to allow himself to heal around it and hope for the best. At least it appeared that the armour had still done the job it was supposed to do: he had not found any bullet fragments in his fishing expedition through his own side at all.

With a grunt, he stood and shook feeling back into his legs before stripping off the rest of his gear and stepping into the shower. He washed thoroughly but quickly, disliking the feeling of vulnerability from being both completely naked and slightly out of reach from his weapons despite the securely locked safehouse door.

When he was clean enough to be satisfied, he taped a fresh pad of gauze over his injury, scooped up the majority of his clothes and gear, and headed back to the small bedroom. He re-dressed in fresh clothes from his kit bag, and then strapped his wrist sheaths back on, the slight weight and the feel of the knives lying along his forearms a comfort to him. Soldier ran a thumb along the length of one of the blades. They, his Pulse Rifle, and his mission were the inheritances left to him by the dead man Soldier Seventy-Six had replaced.

The knives had been a gift, appearing in his quarters unannounced one day shortly after it had been decided that for PR purposes the Strike Commander of a military organization couldn’t be seen walking around visibly armed. Since only five other people and an artificial intelligence had the code to enter his private rooms at the time, the source of the gift had been easy enough to guess.

In hindsight, the decision to disarm him that had led to his receiving the present should have been one of their first warning signs.

Soldier shrugged away the old, pointless train of thought, plugged in his visor and its mount to charge, and headed back to the bathroom. He took his time there, methodically and thoroughly cleaning up after himself. He wasn’t sure how long he would be staying at the safehouse, or how quickly he was going to have to leave, so it was best to be prepared ahead of time. So he cleaned and repacked his med-kit, bundled up the shards of armour he had pulled from his side into the pad of used gauze, and wrung out the blood-stained towel and unrepairable compression shirt that had shared his shower with him before hanging them to dry. Later he would take them somewhere far away and inconspicuous and burn then like he had always done with his personal ‘medical waste’ since The Explosion. He also did what he could to wash the blood out of the pants that he had been wearing without having access to laundry detergent. Most of the blood did actually come out, thanks to his forethought leading him to wear mostly only stain-resistant fabrics, so he hung them to dry too, with the intention of repacking them for a later laundromat trip. He thought about washing out the lining of his jacket as well, then decided not to bother. He would be replacing it soon enough, there was no point in wasting the time.

That done, he settled down on the common room’s single couch and worked his way steadily through an entire multi-pack of high protein energy bars. They were, according to the package, supposed to be ‘chocolate brownie’ flavoured, but there was a sour edge to the taste that in his experience all high protein supplements seemed to share, and also a distinctly chalky taste to the ‘chocolate’. To take his mind off of tasting what he was chewing, Soldier mentally picked apart the raid he had attempted, trying to work out where and how it had started to fall apart.

*** *** ***

The Talon outpost he had attacked had been unimportant in the way of gaining any new information or for raiding anything more than basic supplies. It was mainly used by Talon as a transfer station or way-point when they were shuffling personnel from one place to another, so taking it out would have disrupted the organization’s movements in the region for weeks, maybe even months, while they scrambled to replace it and tried to find how he had known it was there. Even better, Talon was in no position to know that some of the old Blackwatch and Overwatch safehouses were still operational, so Soldier might even have had the opportunity to pick off some of the investigation and recovery crew without having to worry that they would know exactly where to look for him.

Given how small the outpost had appeared to be and the low number of vehicles in working order that he had seen there, Soldier had expected there to be at most a couple of dozen people present when he had attacked. Not the best odds, but none of them were enhanced soldiers the way that he was, and Talon had nothing that could match the combination of Soldier’s Heavy Pulse Rifle and Tactical Visor. Soldier had calculated that it would be a hard fight, but that with the element of surprise on his side the odds would be tilted in his favour.

That had been his mistake, he decided. Hubris, and not doing enough recon. If he had watched the base a little bit longer, or for a couple of days instead of a handful of hours he would have realized that there was a hidden underground garage and somewhere over twice the amount of people that he had initially estimated there to be inside.

Unbidden, the memory of a familiar voice rose in his mind.

“ _Why are you always the one rushing in ahead when I’m the one with the close range guns?_ ” the ghost of Gabriel Reyes lamented from during the Crisis. “ _You’ve got a goddamn rifle, Boy Scout, stay behind the Crusaders’ shields!_ ”

Soldier scuffed a hand through his still damp hair, forcing the memory away before it could berate him further.

Even though he had failed to take out the base, he had still gotten away from the situation with his life and his freedom he reminded himself as he finished off the last of the energy bars in the multi-pack. And maybe Talon would disrupt themselves by uprooting and relocating the outpost anyway since it had so obviously been discovered. He could but hope.

He would go and check, he decided. In a couple of days when he was more recovered and supposedly long gone. And if they didn’t decide to change locations on their own, he could perhaps convince them to with a game of attrition. If he could quietly pick off enough stragglers, make it too much of a problem to stay than to go, he could still benefit. Talon was frequently sloppy. Many of their people believed that simply setting a former base on fire as they left was enough to get rid of any evidence they may have left behind.

Soldier had, more than once, found entire system backups in desk drawers at abandoned Talon bases and gotten pass-codes for otherwise impassable doors from the wrists or hands of dead men. One time he had even found a safe combination on a post-it note stuck to the side of the safe itself.

Since Overwatch had been taken down, there were only a very few who could or would go up against Talon directly, and it had made the organization’s members both arrogant and careless as well as usefully predictable. Although, for almost the last year — and in the last few months in particular — Soldier had been noticing a certain eccentricity in Talon’s movements and actions, as if the general personnel were no longer sure what they were doing. Possibly they were receiving conflicting orders, or there was a power struggle in the upper echelons since Doomfist had escaped. There had been suspicions that Akande Ogundimu had made his way into the group’s leadership before his defeat and imprisonment, but with the murder of Lacroix having happened so close to the Doomfist arrest the thought had never been followed up on.

As he cleaned up the biodegradable wrappers from his energy bars and checked over his Pulse Rifle, Soldier considered the fact that he was probably going to have to modify his tactics. It had not escaped his notice that even the most minor of Talon operations were upping their firepower and increasing the size of their security teams recently as well as becoming less predictable. His usual form of forcing an opening and charging into it was getting much less likely to work in the face of the greater opposition he had been seeing. Perhaps he would try an ‘attrition from the shadows’ tactic on a larger scale than he had before. It had worked remarkably well against Los Muertos a few years ago, perhaps it could also be used effectively against a more organized foe as well. It would be much more time-consuming, but Soldier had little more than time on his hands.

That was for the future, however. For the time being, the plan was rest and recovery.

With a faint grunt for the painful jostle it gave his injury, Soldier dropped to sit on the bed he had decided to use in the two-bed bedroom of the safehouse, propping his jacket against the side of the frame where it would be to hand when he got up as he did. Then he laid out his handgun and his visor on the bedside nightstand before assembling and putting on the visor’s neck mount and carefully clipping his lower face mask into place. The safehouse smelled of concrete and dust, and he had learned the hard way that it was better to not let those smells make their way into his dreams a long time ago.

The batteries of the visor’s computer still needed more charging, but he could leave it plugged in as he slept. He had to lie on his side anyway because of where his injury was, and he knew he slept still enough that the cable would not be knocked loose or damaged in his sleep.

“You sleep as still as one who is dead,” Ana murmured in a memory. “It is as frightening as it is useful.”

Soldier huffed faintly in amusement at the memory as he tugged the neck mount and mask to make sure that the seal had taken. The so-called ‘skill’ of sleeping so still had only been useful because he had been the only one who could share a tent with or sleep next to Reyes without coming out of the experience with a broken nose, or half-strangled, or both. Gabriel’s hair-trigger threat assessment in his sleep had not extended to ‘dead’ bodies, even if they were still warm.

Since everything had ended it was only useful for charging his visor’s batteries while he slept.

Soldier forcibly shoved away the memories from the Omnic Crisis that belonged to a man many years dead, and lay down to sleep.

*** *** ***

Four hours and thirty-three minutes after closing his eyes, Soldier was abruptly catapulted awake by the sound of an alert bell. Someone had just unlocked the door. Even as Soldier bolted upright, he heard the sound of the entrance swinging open and a voice speaking.

“-been opened recently,” a man’s voice said. “Might be someone inside.”

The man’s voice, with its drawling, southern US, molasses accent spoke like a memory that Soldier couldn’t quite put his mental finger on, but there was no time to chase down the fleeting feeling of recognition. Even before the man finished saying his second sentence, Soldier was reaching for his visor and snapping it into place with long-practised precision, feeling it through his fingertips as the mounts locked into place.

Even as the visor was booting up, Soldier reached for his jacket, wanting the armour it offered, cursing himself for not having replaced the two broken plates before going to bed. As he slung it over his shoulders, his vision flashed red and then cleared into his familiar HUD, with an icon in the corner that indicated that the visor was starting the process of connecting to his pulse rifle.

The jacket caught on the charging cable that was still plugged in at the back of his neck as he went to sling it on, and he wasted precious seconds yanking it and himself loose so that he could get both arms properly into the sleeves. Seconds that he found he could not afford, as just as he was reaching for the handgun on the nightstand, the door — which had been partially closed, was shoved open all the way and a man filled the space.

Soldier’s hand stuttered slightly before he closed it around the grip of his gun, partially arrested as his visor outlined the man’s form with the distinctive, yet impossible, blue used to mark a friendly unit. He felt the textured molding bite into his bare palm from his far too tight hold, but Soldier made no move to aim the gun he held. Beyond the blue outline that Soldier had never expected to see again, he found himself, almost equally improbably, looking at a cowboy.

The man held a massive, silver, six-shooter with what should have been a ridiculous spur on the butt levelled at Soldier Seventy-Six. He was tall, crowned with a worn cowboy hat decorated with bullets and a familiar badge on the band, his broad shoulders wrapped in a crimson serape with some sort of orange-gold pattern on it that had certainly seen better times, with what looked like an armoured breastplate under it, dark pants with broken-in chaps over them, and scuffed cowboy boots. Under the brim of his hat was a broad, brown, roughly handsome face with a nose that had certainly been broken more than once, a thick, barely groomed beard, and eyes that gleamed a faintly reddish brown in the glow from the cigarillo clamped between his teeth, sharp and focused despite the fairly neutral expression he wore and the set-in laugh lines that framed them. Though the man’s clothes, wild bush of facial hair, and crimson serape were unfamiliar, there was no mistaking the distinctive gun he held, nor that hat, or those eyes.

Jesse McCree. Reyes’ half feral mostly wild foundling, who had, at first, been an under-fed teenager that had apparently been made entirely of sinew and suspicion. He clearly remembered the way the boy had skulked around the edges of rooms, and how he had spurted through doorways as if an attack awaited him on both sides of them. Remembered watching, in a kind of photographic slide-show thanks to the careful facade of separation between Blackwatch and Overwatch, as the boy had grown into the man who had deliberately filled the door frame of the only exit from the room with his broad stance, making himself a veritable wall against Soldier’s possible escape into the common room of the safehouse.

McCree shifted the lit cigarillo in his mouth from the right side to the left with an ugly ripple of his lips. “Got one in here,” he drawled, never taking his eyes off of Soldier Seventy-Six.

“Other room is clear,” a deep woman’s voice with a thick Slavic accent responded from somewhere out of sight behind McCree.

“So are we leaving before their partner shows up, or setting up an ambush?” another voice, a male tenor with a light accent Soldier could only place as ‘South American’, asked. “I’m gonna have to turn up the music if we go on the move again so soon.”

Still keeping his eyes on Soldier, McCree sucked in a mouthful of smoke and then exhaled it in a steady stream between his teeth.

“We’re stayin’,” he said. “This one, he ain’t Talon by a long shot.” His fingers shifted minutely on his gun. “Ain’t that right?” he tossed directly to Soldier.

Soldier ran his tongue over where one of his scars ran through his lips before he answered, hoping his voice wouldn’t fail him. “It’d be hard to get further from being part of Talon than me,” he agreed, his throat tight.

As he spoke, Soldier was rapidly blinking and flicking his eyes in commands to his visor, trying to search out the reason why it was outlining McCree in electric blue. It was not the ideal thing to do, taking his primary focus off of the cowboy, but he reasoned that if McCree had not shot him yet, he would get some sort of telegraphed warning before he did.

“If this is not Talon, then what?” the woman demanded.

The visor gave him the information he was looking for as she spoke. The cowboy was marked as a friendly unit because he miraculously had a still functioning Overwatch communicator somewhere on his person. Though why McCree, who had resigned and vanished well before things had really hit the fan in the organization still had an Overwatch comm unit, let alone having kept it working was a mystery.

“ _I sent him away,_ ” Gabriel said on that last day he had said anything at all, the last of the worst days in a dead man’s memories.

Sent him away. It seemed that Seventy-Six was not the only one who couldn’t let dead men stay in their graves. Though keeping the communicator of a long-gone organization charged and waiting for a call that would never come since the man who should have made it was nearly a decade deceased was more than Soldier had done.

“Soldier Seventy-Six,” McCree answered the woman. He rocked back on his heels just a little, with a faint clink of spurs. “Reckon you’re the reason that Talon outpost was madder’n a bag of hornets when we dropped by, hmm?”

Soldier tilted his head slightly to the side, but otherwise didn’t move. “Probably,” he allowed, wondering what business McCree and his as yet unseen companions could have had with a Talon base.

“Well now, that goes some way to explanin’ the welcome wagon they rolled out for us, don’t it.”

One of the people somewhere behind McCree snorted mockingly.

McCree ignored them, his expression mild, one side of his mouth turned up just slightly more than the other. Then he spoke.

“Music-Man.”

“Yo,” the tenor-voiced man answered.

McCree took a draw on his cigarillo, and breathed out smoke as he said “Get on the horn. Tell ‘em the situation, and that we’ll be bringin’ an extra body back with us.” He smiled. The expression did not reach his eyes.

“Don’t suppose I get a choice in this,” Soldier commented.

“A’course you get a choice,” McCree assured him, the smile never slipping. “You can walk, or I shoot you and you can get trussed up an’ dragged.”

Soldier let the deciding moment draw out. Assuming that McCree’s skills had not slipped in the decade-plus since Seventy-Six had last seen him shoot — and most likely they had not, from the way the cowboy held his gun: neither too tightly nor too loose — then he could most likely get at least two bullets into Soldier’s torso before he could bring his own gun to bear, as fast as he was. More, probably, if McCree chose to fan the hammer the way that he had taken to doing once he had gotten used to his artificial arm and its capabilities.

The choice Soldier had been offered was no choice at all, and McCree knew it. Possibly the only advantage to be had for Seventy-Six was the chance that McCree might not have expected Soldier to know how much of a lack of choice it was too.

McCree’s gaze never wavered, even as the silence stretched.

It would be incredibly stupid to start a gunfight, or any fight, in the situation he found himself in. After all, even once Soldier fought his way past McCree, there were at least two more armed people in the main room of the safehouse, and they were entirely unknown to Soldier, as far as he could tell from only having heard them speak.

Besides which, Soldier wanted to know what McCree had gotten himself involved with, for the sake of Gabe’s memory if nothing else, and it would be far easier to find out if he was co-operative.

Soldier uncurled his fingers from his gun and lifted his hand away, leaving it on the bedside table. “These old bones take better to walking than dragging,” he said.

Another long moment passed before the muzzle of McCree’s distinctive six-shooter finally dipped, just a little. “They would, at that,” he agreed with Soldier, his affable tone at odds with his alert stance. He shifted, rocking back and to the side. “I’ll be thankin’ ya to be stepping out of there now, nice an’ easy,” he ordered. “Don’t go makin’ anyone regret anything,” he added as Soldier started to move to slide off of the bed.

It was a strange way of putting things, Soldier thought as he got off of the bed and shuffled across the room to the door as smoothly and non-threateningly as he could manage despite his armour, visor, and mask. Almost as if McCree thought that someone other than Seventy-Six himself would be unhappy about his getting shot.

McCree backed out of the doorway, allowing Soldier to step into the main room without having to take his eyes off of him.

The first thing Soldier saw as he entered the common room was a young, slightly built black man with thick, luxurious dreadlocks tied up into a high ponytail, a neat goatee, very heavily armoured legs, and strangely glowing feet crouched with his back against the wall and his knees to his chest next to the safehouse exit. What Soldier could see of him was fine-boned, but well-muscled, and he caught part of the shape of a dark tattoo on his bared shoulder and upper arm, a curving black shadow on his dark brown skin. He was watching Seventy-Six though an unusual headpiece with a tinted lens shaped like glasses or goggles over his eyes attached to over-sized headphones over his ears, one hand with what looked like a haptic glove on it cupped over his mouth as he talked quietly in a muffled voice, the other holding what appeared to be the mutant love-child of a gun and a megaphone glowing with green lights, its wide bell vibrating slightly and facing Soldier. There was also, oddly, the sound of some sort of music coming from the young man, a song with a pulse like a heartbeat and a strum of electronic strings, though it was strangely hard to directly focus on listening to it.

This, then, had to be the one that McCree had called Music-Man. There was something about him that Soldier felt like he had encountered before, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. Some familiarity about the song he couldn’t quite focus on that made him think he had heard it somewhere else before.

The second person he saw, just behind McCree, her hands twitching on what Soldier could only identify as a terribly over-sized energy weapon of some sort that he would be more inclined to label a cannon than a gun, was an absolutely gigantic woman with short, bright pink hair and a dark scowl on her square-jawed face. She towered head and shoulders over McCree and Soldier, and he was fairly certain that the muscled biceps bared by her sleeveless armoured shirt were at least as thick around as his own thighs. Everything in her tense stance and dark expression screamed that she did not like the situation, and that she was winding tighter with every passing moment.

Soldier bit back an impulsive comment about McCree somehow missing Reinhardt so much that he’d hunted out his female physical equivalent to work with. Not only had Reinhardt and McCree only very rarely been in each other’s company, it was very much not a remark that Soldier Seventy-Six should have known to make at all. Nor had McCree ever met the young Reinhardt the woman reminded Soldier of. By the time the gunslinger and the crusader had encountered each other for the first time, Reinhardt had seasoned and no longer showed his impatience quite so openly.

The woman was also strangely familiar, in her own way. Coupled with the Slavic accent he had heard earlier, the brilliant pink of her hair reminded him of how the Russian infantry favoured the fashion, their units a sea of neons in blue, pink, and green before they put their helmets on. The woman looked terribly young to be a retiree, however, if she had in fact been a member of the Russian army at some point. Possibly a discharge, Soldier considered, though he doubted that Russia would be willing to let someone with her impressive physique leave so easily.

McCree waved Soldier further into the room and incidentally even more firmly into the line of fire of the weapon ‘Music-Man’ was holding — if the thing actually fired anything, it was hard to tell. The crouching man’s eyes moved over Seventy-Six, lingering on his side.

“ _Chica Grande_ will be packin’ your kit for you,” McCree said as he drifted sideways with a jingle of spurs so that the pink-haired woman could enter the bedroom without having to pass between him and Seventy-Six. “Don’ worry Soldier, she knows military folds.” He smirked faintly around his cigarillo.

The woman’s scowl deepened at the ‘military folds’ comment as she stomped into the bedroom, although she didn’t say anything. She had not had a reaction at being called ‘ _chica grande_ ’, though, so either she didn’t care or she didn’t know what it meant. There was no indication which option it was.

Soldier found the comment about military folding to be much more interesting in any case. Russia didn’t really do dishonourable discharges: they tended to imprison them, so unless she had escaped that was not much of a likelihood. The woman was far too young looking to have retired, however, and Seventy-Six somehow doubted that a retired member of Russia’s infantry would be taking orders from Jesse McCree of all people if she really was far older than she looked. There was, of course, the possibility that she wasn’t Russian at all, but as much as Soldier wracked his memory, he was unable to think of a country in the Slavic-speaking area of the world whose military were also prone to dying their hair in neon colours the way the Russians did.

It was beyond strange.

With effort, Soldier Seventy-Six kept his hands down and lax at his sides — not clenched into fists or crossing his arms across his chest as he would have liked to do as the sounds of the woman putting down her weapon and starting to go through his things came from the bedroom. She would not find much. If it had been McCree doing the search, Soldier might have worried that the gunslinger would find Soldier’s stash of data chips: they had both been taught how to effectively hide such things by the same person, after all.

“ _Data is easy to hide,_ ” an electronic voice in his memory reminded him. “ _All you need to do is put it where no one thinks to look for it._ ” Liao had always laughed when they said that, the sound like music in contrast to the even, unaffected tone of their translator.

Still, though the woman would have little chance of finding his carefully gathered and hoarded intel, and though Soldier carried nothing that would identify him as the man he had used to be, the bags she was going through were nearly everything he had left in the world that were his. He hated even the thought of some stranger pawing through the meagre belongings.

The young black man’s hand fell away from his mouth, his comm conversation apparently over. He shifted in place with an odd whirring, scraping sound, and Soldier realized that the glowing green lights at the bottom of his feet were actually some sort of skate blades.

“Pickup in three hours,” the young man said, his voice clear and pitched to carry. “Still at the same place.” Soldier watched his eyes flick between himself and McCree. “They’ll be prepped for both of us.”

Soldier carefully kept his frown from visibly knitting his brows over the edge of his visor, wondering what exactly had been meant by that.

McCree nodded. “Good.” Then, quite unexpectedly, he grinned for a moment. “The Big Guy is gonna be over the moon when he realizes he was right about our man here bein’ former Overwatch.”

The young man’s eyes went wide, and his jaw dropped a little before he collected himself with visible effort. “Man, do you gotta say it that way?” he complained. “There’s gotta be a line you just crossed.”

“It was said in poor taste,” the woman’s voice rang from the bedroom, although she did not come out.

McCree’s grin took on a decidedly wicked cast at their responses. There was some sort of inside joke going on that Soldier was not getting, but he was far more concerned that McCree was apparently taking orders from someone, and that same someone had some sort of close interest in Soldier Seventy-Six.

The young black man shifted again, a restless movement. “The Soldier’s injured,” he said suddenly, propping the elbow of his free hand on his knee and resting his chin on it, turning himself into a remarkably compact bundle for just how much armour he was wearing on his legs. “His right lower back.”

“Is he now,” McCree said, his tone thoughtful. “Anything you should be doing about it?”

The young man shrugged, a fluid ripple of his shoulders. “I could turn up the music, maybe,” he said. “But I’d rather save the bonus for when we gotta move again.”

Soldier eyed the young man’s headgear, realizing that the tinted lens he wore was actually a field medic visor. It was much more sophisticated than he would have expected to see outside of the military or a highly-priced mercenary company, and he wondered once again just who McCree had fallen in with to be working with people who had access to such expensive and specialized equipment.

“There are biotic cannisters.” The pink-haired woman appeared in the bedroom doorway, holding the harness that Soldier usually wore around his upper arm, the yellow canisters still slotted into it. “They are old, and a strange design, but fully charged.” She held them out. “Lúcio, you should use one.”

Seventy-Six tensed involuntarily. The biotic canisters were the most precious things he owned; they were irreplaceable if he lost or broke them. Seeing them dangling so carelessly from the woman’s hand sent a stab of horror and preemptive loss through him.

“Nah,” the young black man — who was apparently named Lúcio — said, waving off the woman’s suggestion. “I’m pretty sure the bullet’s still in there. I don’t wanna seal it in.”

Soldier was taken aback at Lúcio’s words. Wherever or however the young man had a bullet in him, it was invisible with the way that he was crouched against the wall. He also had no visible bandages on him and yet there was no blood around at all, except for a light splatter that had arced across McCree’s massive, ostentatious, entirely too truthful, BAMF belt buckle at some point. Perhaps, Soldier mused, the young man had been hit with something very low calibre, and his hunched position was holding the wound closed, or hiding the gauze patch over it.

The woman nodded, not bothering to argue with Lúcio’s decision, and turned to go back to her search of Soldier’s belongings.

“Be careful with those cannisters, Zarya,” McCree drawled, leaning with clear yet subtle emphasis on the name he gave. “Ain’t no one who makes field-projection biotics any more, those’re precious rare these days.”

Soldier had not even noticed McCree looking at the cannisters. He cursed himself for the inattention, momentary though it had been. All McCree had ever needed was a moment’s distraction in his target. Sometimes he didn’t even need that much.

The woman paused, and looked at the bandoleer she held with new respect. “I did not know there were any left that still worked,” she commented. “I shall treat them as delicately as gathering eggs.” She vanished back into the room.

Lúcio cut a glance over to McCree. “Since when does B let her anywhere near its therapy chickens?” he asked.

McCree shrugged one shoulder. “Beats me.”

“I do not,” Zarya spoke from the bedroom, “enter that broken thing’s territory.” She re-emerged from the room, the strap of Solder’s Pulse Rifle tangled around one hand and his large kit bag dangling from the other. She set them on the floor, against the farthest wall from where Soldier stood. “My family kept ducks when I was a girl.”

She turned and went back into the bedroom. She came out again a few moments later, somehow holding her massive energy weapon in one hand and Soldier’s smaller kit bag in the other.

“That all of it?” McCree asked as she added the smaller bag to the pile.

“I keep on the move,” Soldier answered before Zarya could, crossing his arms. “No use for extra baggage.” His voice was harsher and more defensive than he had meant it to be.

Something Soldier could not identify flicked across McCree’s expression and was gone. Zarya, her side to him, watched him out of the corner of her eye. Lúcio’s fingers drummed a fast rhythm on his knee.

“Understandable,” McCree said at last. He rocked on his heels, setting his spurs jangling, before finally reaching up to his mouth and removing the cigarillo from his lips, ashing it onto the floor with an efficient flick. “Now, it’s gon’ be some time before we’ve got to go catch our ride, as you heard, and I don’t want to be standin’ and holding a gun on ya for the whole couple’a hours. Suspect you don’t want to be stood there that whole time neither.” He stuck his cigarillo back in his mouth.

Soldier did not take the provided opening to speak, only tilted his head very slightly to the side, settled his weight back on his heels, and waited for the cowboy to continue.

McCree only allowed the silence to last as long as taking another draw on his cigarillo. “Seein’ as how things’ve been so amiable so far, I’m proposin’ a deal,” he said.

Soldier restrained a noise, unsure whether it would have been a snort, a growl, or a sharp bark of laughter at the man’s choice of words. Apparently, McCree was never going to grow out of certain habits.

“What I’m offering,” McCree went on without missing a beat, “is that you get to relax in there,” he waved toward the bedroom with his free hand, “nice an’ comfy for the next couple’a hours instead of being tied hand and foot in the middle of this here room for that time. And in return, you don’t give us a fuss or run-around when it comes time to go and catch our ride out.”

“Not much into bondage,” Soldier admitted after mulling over the offered deal for a moment. Of course, everything would change once they forced his mask off. There was no way that McCree would fail to recognize the face of the dead man that Soldier wore, even with the newer scars bisecting it. Still, he would take and make whatever concessions he could before that time came. “I’ll take the room.”

“I’ll be holdin’ you to your word to be not givin’ us trouble later on, then,” McCree said, and waved him toward the room.

Soldier uncrossed his arms and strode in. To his surprise, McCree merely gave him a nod and kicked the door shut rather than patting Seventy-Six down or demanding the removal of his mask beforehand. Soldier lingered by the closed door, listening to what was going on in the safehouse common room.

“Hey, _Chica_ , help me with this,” he heard McCree say clearly. There was a clunk, a small amount of grunting, and something thumped heavily into the door. Soldier guessed that it was the couch from the main room serving as a makeshift barricade for the lock-free door.

“Anything I should know about the old man’s luggage?” McCree asked.

“Only the biotics,” Zarya answered, her shrug audible in her voice. “The rest is very ordinary. Clothes, ammunition, toiletries, maintenance supplies, and med-kit.”

“Travels light, exceptin’ that monster of a rifle, indeed,” McCree snorted, from somewhere else in the room. Soldier could only assume the cowboy was prowling the room. “He’s gotta have a data stash somewhere,” the man added, his tone thoughtful.

Soldier Seventy-Six tensed. McCree had been taught things that Zarya obviously had not about concealing items in plain sight. If he went through Seventy-Six’s bags, he would know to thoroughly finger the waistband of the worn-out sweats that a man living Soldier’s life would have had no down-time to ever wear, and find the cache of microchips Soldier had hidden there.

The strange, inexplicable laxness in McCree’s behaviour continued, however, as Soldier heard him say “He wouldn’t know to be hittin’ the places he has been if’n he didn’t,” from somewhere else again entirely.

Suddenly Soldier realized that he knew exactly what McCree was doing in the other room, that he had watched him do the same thing before, in his previous lifetime. Apparent agitation and restlessness, accompanied by prowling around with a reeling, jagged path with no obvious pattern to it that none-the-less managed to cover the entirety of the room it was being performed in, marking the exact dimensions of the space, the placement of every object within it, and the identity of every person present in the gunslinger’s mind with the precision of a laser-measured photograph. Assessing territory. Soldier noted to himself that he had not heard the jingle of spurs at all since the bedroom door had closed, despite McCree’s voice coming from various points that were all over the room. McCree was on high alert, and Soldier Seventy-Six, for whatever reason, had been dismissed entirely as a concern in the cowboy’s mind the moment the couch had been pushed up against the door.

“There’s something weird about that guy’s bio-readouts,” Lúcio said, his words causing a cold pit to open in the bottom of Soldier’s stomach.

“What do you mean, ‘weird’?” Zarya asked.

“Like except for having some holes in him that shouldn’t be there he’s fine, except that it’s also saying he’s not fine at all,” Lúcio explained. “I don’t really know what I’m seeing here.”

“The doctor back at base will know,” Zarya said confidently. “Do not worry.”

Soldier pulled away from the door, going to sit on the bed. He had too much to think about without having to overhear any more. He would not, until several minutes ago, have pegged McCree for ever getting himself involved in an organized group again after his abrupt, angry departure from Blackwatch. And yet, there he was, the apparent leader of an admittedly small team, with a scheduled extraction, some form of leader, and a base with a doctor on staff. Not to mention that there was some form of information-gathering going on as well, to have known the Talon outpost both Soldier and McCree’s team had attempted to hit that day.

Soldier needed to know just what was going on, and co-operating was the most straightforward way to find out, thankfully. Beyond simple curiosity, whomever or whatever the group was, it appeared to also have a beef with Talon, and Seventy-Six needed to know more about them so that he could avoid crossing paths with them again, and to know how to hit their mutual targets first, so that the information and the people that he was hunting wouldn’t be taken away from him.

  



	2. Chapter Two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A couple of tags have been added to the story that I should have remembered to put on at the start, namely warnings for PTSD and for a panic attack that occurs in this chapter. My apologies for overlooking them.

An hour and fifty-four minutes after Soldier Seventy-Six had been shut into the bedroom of the safehouse, he was awakened out of a light doze by the sound of the couch being dragged away from blocking the door. He slid to the edge of the bed and sat facing the room’s sole exit.

After nearly two minutes of waiting, the door was swung open to reveal Zarya standing on the other side holding her energy cannon, her stance making her look intimidating and even more massive. Something shone and shimmered in the air between her and Soldier, and his visor lit up with urgent warnings of anomalous energy readings as he looked at it. Then, as they stared at each other the shimmer faded out with a faint crackle, taking the warnings with it.

“Time to go,” the woman said, and stooped to grab Soldiers boots from where they had apparently been left beside the door on her side, tossing them to land at the foot of the bed with a solid thunk from their armour plating. As she turned, Soldier saw that she had his Pulse Rifle strapped over her shoulder.

Soldier felt a sense of relief as he moved to put on his boots. It was pretty obvious that they wouldn’t have let him carry his gun when they left, with him being their prisoner even if he was being a very co-operative one for his own reasons, but it was reassuring to see that they didn’t mean to abandon or destroy the weapon. In fact, the connection between his rifle and his visor informed him that it hadn’t even been unloaded or powered down, so it seemed that they hadn’t even tried to tamper with it.

As he locked down the stiff catches of his boots and stood, Soldier decided that he would consider the lack of any mischief being done to his gun as a good sign about the sort of captivity that he could expect to go through with this group. Leaving the bedroom as he zipped up his jacket, he saw that McCree had his large kit bag slung over his shoulder under his serape, and that his smaller kit bag had been moved to sit next to Lúcio, who was still crouched against the wall where he had been before. Which meant that none of Seventy-Six’s things were being abandoned at the safehouse, making Soldier feel more hopeful for an easy exit from captivity.

“There y’are,” McCree said, hitching the strap of Soldier’s bag into a more comfortable position on his shoulder. “Still feeling co-operative, Seventy-Six?”

“You held up your end of the bargain, I’ll hold to mine,” Soldier agreed.

“Good to hear.” McCree nodded sharply. “Our plane can’t land ‘round here so we’re gonna be takin’ a wander to it. I’ll be takin’ point. You stay where Zarya can see you, or things’re gonna get a mite painful,” the gunslinger instructed.

Soldier dipped his chin in a faint nod of acknowledgement.

McCree strode over to the exit, and offered a hand up to Lúcio. “Up an’ at ‘em, Monkeyfrog.”

Lúcio hooked his arm through the strap of the smaller kit bag and accepted the hand, rising to his feet. For the first time, Soldier saw a substantial hole, one nearly big enough to have put his fist in, that had been blown into the front of the upper thigh of the young man’s leg armour, the damage having been hidden by his previous crouch. Inexplicably, despite the hole being big enough for Seventy-Six to clearly see a red ruin of shredded flesh through it, there was no visible attempt at bandaging it, or even of packing the wound. Lúcio had given a good reason for not using Soldier’s nano-biotics earlier, saying that he didn’t want to seal the bullet that had caused the damage inside his leg, and his team seemed unconcerned despite the seriousness of the wound, but now that Soldier had finally seen it for himself he was appalled. Seventy-Six had no idea why the skater had not passed out from blood loss or shock in the hour-plus that he had spent in the safehouse, let alone during however long it had taken the trio to get there from the Talon outpost. He had to bite down on his tongue, hard, to keep himself from demanding that the boy receive triage immediately.

“Turn up the music as high as you need to,” McCree said quietly to Lúcio, and with a pat to the younger man’s shoulder, opened the safehouse door.

Lúcio slung the strap of the kit bag over his shoulder, and gave McCree a thumbs up. “Good to go!”

“Stairs are clear,” McCree said with a nod. “Do your thing.”

The young man skimmed from side to side on his skates, adjusting to the weight of the bag. Then he adjusted something with a flick of his haptic gloves and an odd pumping, pointing gesture, and with a sudden swell of a different piece of music that somehow made Soldier’s skin tingle and his muscles jump, Lúcio skated in a rapid circle to pick up speed before hurling himself toward the stairs. Just as the toes of his skates were about to meet the bottom step, he jumped sideways, bending his knees deeply. His glowing skate blades met the wall, and with a strange whirring, grinding, scraping noise, he skimmed right up the wall as if he had jumped onto a moving sidewalk rather than a vertical surface, brushing the fingertips of one hand along it as he went.

“What?” Soldier demanded, unable to stop the exclamation from bursting from his lips.

McCree shrugged. “Trick o’ the tech, Soldier. Up you go.”

The answer was entirely less than satisfactory to Soldier, but it was not as if he had expected any better. He did find it strange that McCree was sending him up next, however, since if if he was going to try to run — which he was not planning to do, at least not yet — the unguarded time as he reached the top of the stairs with an entire town to run away in would be the best time to do it. Although he couldn’t discount McCree’s ability to read and predict people. It was entirely possible that he had predicted, correctly, that Soldier would not abandon his Pulse Rifle or his biotics so easily.

Soldier shook off his distracting thoughts and climbed the stairs, finding it easier the closer that he got to the top, the pain in his side from his shrapnel wound ebbing away as he got closer to street level. He found Lúcio standing at the top waiting for him, the young man’s strange megaphone-slash-speaker-slash-gun out and pointed at him. So, Soldier thought, they were not being as trusting of his good behaviour as he had thought they were. There was something reassuring in that. He noticed that the music coming from the young man was still much louder than it had been before, though the song had been changed back to the electronic strings piece that was so hard to focus on.

Zarya was the next one to come up the stairs, her tread heavy and solid behind Soldier Seventy-Six as she climbed. She gave him an odd look as he moved out of her way at the top, a quizzical expression with one eyebrow raised higher than the other, warring between being impressed and being surprised. Soldier’s best guess was that she had expected him to run.

Nearly eight minutes passed in silence before McCree joined them at the top of the stairs. It was around three minutes longer than Soldier estimated the gunslinger would have needed to set the safehouse back into the long-term rest mode that Seventy-Six had found it in when he had first checked it out in the morning, in what almost felt like a lifetime ago. Soldier wondered if the cowboy had done something extra in the time alone down there, or if he had simply been oddly slow in moving to reset the switches and climb the stairs.

He was not given very long to think about it.

“All right, time to head out,” McCree said almost the moment he arrived at the head of the stairs. “Y’all know the formation, keep movin’ and have an eye peeled for any Talon bastards lurking round.” He adjusted his gun in its holster, loosening and angling it for an easy quick-draw. “Do what ya need to to make sure you an’ the Soldier keep up, Music-Man,” he said to Lúcio. “Move out, team.”

Except for the words being delivered in a thick south-western drawl, it was so much like heading out under the command of Gabriel Reyes that Soldier had to catch his breath against a sharp, unexpected stab of grief as McCree headed out along the alleyway that held the staircase down to the safehouse door.

With an effort of will, Seventy-Six pushed away the emotion that belonged to a man long dead, and fell in behind McCree. After a few steps, he heard the solid, heavy tread of Zarya start to follow him.

Lúcio didn’t join the three of them until they were all in the street the alley connected to. Soldier realized why when the young man spurted out of the alley and skimmed up beside him with a faint waft of the music that made the inside of Soldier’s skin tingle. Even with his injury and the extra weight of Seventy-Six’s kit bag, Lúcio’s skates easily made him much faster than any of his companions.

McCree set a steady, ground-eating pace down the street, Soldier Seventy-Six and Zarya following. Lúcio took up a meandering path of s-bends and warped figure eights that sent him looping around and past Zarya and Soldier, keeping even with the team without having to slow himself down in a way that was far too natural to not have been practised ahead of time.

Once again, Soldier found himself wondering how McCree had fallen in with these people, with the added question of just how long the association had been going on.

The team kept moving. The only one who stopped at all was McCree, who paused at each turn and cross-street to let the others catch up, only to forge on ahead again once everyone was across the street or around the corner. Soldier, given a great deal of opportunity to do so, watched the gunslinger’s tense prowl down the streets, broken only occasionally by a jingle from the spurs on his boots or another, more muted one from somewhere under under the crimson serape he wore, and noted that the younger man was still definitely expecting trouble. It only made sense, as darkness had fallen hours ago, and the pre-dawn shadows could hide any number of Talon operatives hunting for McCree’s team and Soldier Seventy-Six himself, or could contain a trap waiting for them.

Soldier stayed alert, walked ready for a fight despite the pain that it made blossom anew in his shrapnel wound, and eyed every alley they passed with deep suspicion.

He realized after several streets and far too many corners that wherever they were going to meet their plane, they were taking an extremely convoluted, circuitous path to get there, to the point that Seventy-Six wondered if anyone in their party other than McCree actually knew where they were in relation to where they were going.

Given just how worked up the Talon troops in the area most likely were by then, Soldier appreciated and approved of the extra caution. Especially since he was almost completely disarmed, with only the knives in his concealed wrist sheaths to defend himself with. The knives were only meant for close-quarters fighting, they would be next to useless against someone shooting down a street or an alley at him.

Lúcio skimmed past him, leaving a trail of music behind him that stroked soothingly along Soldier’s tense nerves, distracting him from the throb of pain in his flank for as long as he could hear it, and Seventy-Six wondered just what young man’s role was in the trio that had come across Soldier in his hiding place. The fact that the terribly young-looking man was wearing a field medic visor said much about his place, but the assault team was far too small to be able to afford to have one member whose only task was to be a medic, and his not having any visible medical gear besides his tinted lens combined with the lack of treatment for the hole in his leg seemed very strange.

“We’re nearly to the van,” McCree said quietly to the group as they briefly clustered up to go around a corner. “You holdin’ up, Soldier? Music-Man?”

Soldier just nodded, mildly surprised at the consideration of being asked at all that McCree was showing a prisoner, especially one that was probably slowing them down on top of being the one responsible for the failure of whatever it was the team had meant to do at the Talon outpost.

“Still have my insides on the inside,” Lúcio reported. “Doing alright.”

McCree nodded, and forged on ahead again.

Soldier mulled over McCree mentioning a van as they started moving again. It did make sense that they would have ground transport of some sort, given that Soldier had been told that their extraction was going to be by plane. Landing a plane for long enough to take on passengers would be both easier and less noticeable outside of the city limits, where there would be fewer buildings or potential witnesses. Still, that the team had both forms of transportation pre-arranged was telling. Whoever they were working for, it was pretty organized from what Soldier had heard and seen of it so far.

That the ‘van’ was parked so far away from both the safehouse and the Talon outpost that the team and Soldier had separately attacked that day Seventy-Six put down more to McCree than whomever he was working for, however. It was exactly the kind of fore-thought that Reyes had advised his people to apply on missions, and the cowboy had taken to it like a duck to water when he had been introduced to it back in his youth.

The party drew together again to turn another corner. Once they were all around, however, McCree stayed with the group rather than forging on ahead of them again. Soldier realized that the vehicle they were going to be taking to the plane pickup had to be parked somewhere on the street that they were on. He scanned the various cars and trucks parked along either side of the road, but was unable to guess on sight alone which one was the one that they were heading toward. The street had been chosen well.

Soon though, Soldier was distracted from his scan by a jingling ring of metal against metal coming from somewhere nearby. He glanced toward the direction that the distinctive sound was coming from, and felt his entire gut go cold with horror.

Jesse McCree was idly spinning a metal keyring of car keys around the metal forefinger of his left hand, producing the noise that had caught Soldier Seventy-Six’s attention.

McCree had the car keys.

Soldier only just barely managed to control the immediate impulse to tackle the cowboy to the pavement and tear the keyring from his hand, his mind going back to the first and only time that he had ever gotten into a vehicle of any kind with Jesse McCree behind the wheel.

*** *** ***

“You’re driving, _Vaquero_ ,” Reyes barked, and hurled the keys to the Hummer at McCree’s head.

Jack blinked, refusing to be impressed as the lanky twenty-something slid sideways to avoid the projectile, realized it wasn’t actually a weapon, and snapped up a hand to catch the key-fob just as it started to pass his ear.

He then went on to stare at his hand as if his commander had tossed him a live scorpion rather than some fairly nondescript car keys, which in the golden light of later hindsight should have been Jack’s first clue.

“Boss...” McCree said uncertainly, extending the hand holding the keys toward them, “I don’t think-”

“I said drive, ingrate,” Gabriel cut him off, hitching Jack in his grasp. “Unless you want to be responsible for kicking Commander No-Dodge here until he stays still long enough for you to patch up his ribs.”

Jack wanted to protest that he certainly had dodged, which was why the bullets aimed for him had only gone through the muscle-meat over his ribs and left a deep divot in his thigh rather than having pierced his lungs or groin, but Gabe’s suddenly hitching him up in his grasp made him gasp and see stars from the pain instead. Which Reyes had probably planned for when he did it.

“Through the fence, onto the highway,” Reyes continued to McCree, all but ignoring Jack. “Then a literal straight line to the plane out. Not. An. Issue.”

McCree’s face conveyed great skepticism, but he shrugged, adjusted his ridiculous cowboy hat, and said “If you say so, Boss,” before hurrying over to the driver’s door of their transport.

As soon as the door locks popped, Reyes wrenched open the rear door of the Hummer and all but threw Morrison into the vehicle.

“Ow!” Jack clapped a hand over the bleeding gash over his ribs as he hit the seat, the one in his leg having already been hastily bandaged with McCree’s bandanna. “Shit, Gabe-”

“Shove over,” Reyes demanded, already climbing through the still-open door.

Jack scooted over to the other side of the vehicle along the bench seat, keeping his hand over his ribs. Gabriel wasted no time in following him, slamming the door closed behind himself and enclosing them in the bulletproof protection of the Hummer’s armour.

“Let me see,” Gabriel said, his tone much gentler now that they were in a safer position than standing exposed in the small lot that they had parked in.

Jack sighed, and lifted his hand from his ribs, vaguely registering the click of a seatbelt buckle from the driver’s seat, and McCree muttering softly to himself in Spanish.

Gabriel’s eyes caught the light for just a moment as he bent to inspect the bloody furrow Jack had uncovered, flashing molten and otherworldly.

“You have the worst luck, Jackie,” he chuckled humourlessly. “Or you’ve been cursed. There’s no other way that it would happen you were not just the only one who got shot but that you took, like, two bullets when you weren’t even the one on point.”

“A curse. Definitely a curse,” Jack agreed, leaning his head back to rest on the seat back as Gabriel looked over his ribs. Vaguely, he wondered if he should be concerned that he could recognize the words for ‘ten and two’ being repeated at intervals in McCree’s muttered Spanish from the front seat. “That’s why there was an extra guard tonight.”

Gabriel snorted and produced a tiny spray bottle of temporary liquid bandage from one of his pockets. “Still prefer tagging along with us to doing your paperwork, or one of those Overwatch missions where you gotta do a press conference before, during, and after?” he asked as he yanked up Jack’s shirt with a complete lack of formality and doused his wound with the faintly clove-scented adhesive.

“Fuck yes. Press conferences suck, and you’re damn lucky that you’ll probably never have to do one again thanks to your ‘ _Vaquero_ ’.” Jack deliberately mangled his pronunciation of the Spanish word nearly past any recognition, just to see Gabe wince.

On the whole, it had been a brilliant tactical move on Reyes’ part to ‘forget’ to fully supervise Jesse the last time the UN had insisted on including Blackwatch personnel in one of their periodic Honours Banquets. McCree was still filling out then, and looked far younger than his age, so the entire banquet had been treated to a reeling drunk insisting, repeatedly, that he was “twen’y-one, dammitall” at increasing volume. Nor did Jack doubt that the boy had been given some rather strange advice beforehand about what was and what wasn’t proper to say to dignitaries. Not that he would ask Gabe about that, or ever cease to appreciate that he didn’t have to remind Reyes not to tell him. And he thought that he would probably forever envy that Blackwatch members would never again be required to regularly parade themselves around like cattle at an auction without having practically ended a war beforehand.

Jack sighed with something close to relief as the temporary bandage spray hit the furrow in his muscles with a sharp sting followed by a familiar almost-numbness as the mild contact anaesthetic kicked in. The relief was all the greater from knowing that it would only last a few minutes before his hyperactive super-soldier metabolism burned through the painkiller.

“That should hold you until we get back to the carrier,” Reyes said, and tucked the little bottle back into his pocket. “How much time have we got?”

Caught up in the relief of no longer feeling a distinct line of fire along his ribs, Jack answered absentmindedly “Five forty-two.”

Reyes’ face snapped up to stare into his so quickly there was an audible pop from his neck. “Five-” he broke himself off and whirled to face the driver’s seat, roaring “Jesse, why aren’t we moving yet?”

McCree yelped and fumbled with the ignition.

“That extra guard,” Jack answered Gabriel’s question before the other man could ask it, knowing what it would be. “And stopping to tie up my leg ate time, too.”

Gabriel’s lips pulled back, but the sound of his annoyed snarl was covered by the roar of the Hummer’s engine coming to life. McCree immediately floored the gas, and the vehicle all but leapt forward, straight at the corrugated steel security fence that surrounded the facility.

The Hummer hit the fence, the fence went down in a shriek of abused metal and hit the ditch, and McCree never let up on the gas so the vehicle kept going over the downed corrugated panels even as they crumpled under the weight of the front tires where the ground dropped away underneath them. Gabriel whooped with something that sounded suspiciously like glee to Jack as the Hummer bucked first into then out of the ditch and onto the highway on the other side.

“Think I bit m’ tongue,” McCree complained, cranking the wheel to slew the vehicle onto the road. A wordless sound of dismay escaped him as the Hummer fishtailed wildly at the manoeuvre before he fought it back into a straight line.

Reyes glanced around, peering out of the windows, his eyebrows slowly gathering together in a frown. Then he muttered something under his breath, and reached forward to pound on the console between the front seats. “Right, not left, _Vaquero_! Pickup’s the other way!”

McCree snarled something in Spanish that earned the console another smack from Reyes that sent cracks spider-webbing away from his hand, and cranked the wheel again. Something in the Hummer screamed as he threw it into a far too fast u-turn, the vehicle briefly skidding sideways partway through the turn from sheer momentum.

Having recognized approximately four words out of McCree’s torrent as ones Gabe had shown a particular fondness for during the Crisis, Jack held his tongue and considered the young Blackwatch agent lucky that it had been the console and not his seat that had taken the hit. Still, when Jack glanced over to gauge his mood, Reyes was grinning, sharp and bright, and Jack thought that the console had taken such a hit simply because it could, not because he was angry.

Somehow, despite the slide and the shriek that Jack was fairly certain was coming from the brakes the Hummer made it through the u-turn without spinning out. The vehicle swerved wildly at the end as McCree took the bend of the turn slightly too far, starting to make a P instead of a U, then over-corrected.

Then he over-corrected again trying to fix the first, the new swerve far too sharp, and the Hummer shuddered, leaned, and abruptly tipped sideways, somehow still driving forward on only two wheels.

The entire of Gabriel’s considerable bulk slid across the bench seat from the sudden tilt and crashed into Jack, sandwiching him against the door and sending a sharp spike of pain through the wound in his ribcage from the compression. He made a sound remarkably like that of a cat whose tail had just been caught under a rocking chair.

“No no no no no!” McCree wailed from the driver’s seat.

Gabriel positively roared with laughter.

Jack shoved at the man crushing him against the side panel, but was unable to get the leverage he needed to shift him from his position. “Gabe, get off!” he demanded. “My ribs, you-”

Gabriel twisted, slamming one hand to the door panel just over Jack’s shoulder and gripped the back of the seat with the other, shoving himself up so that his torso, at least, was no longer crushing Jack’s. “Sorry Boy Scout,” he said, his tone contrite despite the laughter still clinging around the edges of it. “Gravity is, like, a bitch,” he added, and started laughing again nearly before the words finished coming out of his mouth.

“Sure, hilarious,” Jack muttered, and eyed the road passing far too close and at entirely the wrong angle through the window by his head.

“I can fix this, I can fix this,” McCree babbled frantically. “I can fix this, there’s gotta be a way to fix this!”

Reyes whooped like a hyena with laughter. “This is your best fuck-up yet, Cowboy!” he managed between chuckles. “I didn’t even know a Hummer could do this! I should make you drive all our getaways!”

No one had ever accused Jack Morrison of being a stupid man. With Gabriel’s last sentence, a terrible suspicion — a suspicion that Gabe had made McCree drive because he expected something like what was happening to occur — dawned upon him.

“Way to make a man feel used for another’s fun, Boss,” McCree responded, confirming Jack’s realization.

“Ingrate,” Gabe shot back without any heat.

Jack smacked Gabe, open-handed, in the shoulder just above the plate of his chest armour so that the still laughing man could feel it.

“You asshole!” the blond snapped. “Doing this just so you can get-” he broke himself off abruptly as the countdown running in the back of his mind suddenly registered critical numbers. “Shit!” Jack scrambled in his pinned position, trying to get a view through the window that wasn’t just passing road. “Where are we? How far- The timer!”

There was only enough time for Gabriel to stare down at him wide-eyed and say “Oh fuck.” as McCree simultaneously said “What?” before the very large bomb that they had carried out of the trunk of the Hummer and squarely into the middle of some highly illegal ‘produce’ that was being stored at the particular facility they were trying to leave behind went off in a massive, incendiary explosion.

If there hadn’t been an unexpected extra guard to deal with after they had started the timer and were making their exit, if Jack hadn’t been shot by that extra guard, if they hadn’t stopped — twice, because McCree hadn’t tied his bandanna tight enough the first time — on the way out to deal with Jack’s injuries after killing the guard, maybe even — a very faint maybe — if McCree hadn’t turned the wrong way and had to make a u-turn back toward the holding yard and the bomb, they would have been far enough away. As it was, they were only far enough from the bomb to avoid being enveloped in the fireball.

The shock-wave from the explosion caught the already turned-up Hummer the way a gust of wind hit a sail and sent it spinning violently through the air and off the road. As the vehicle cartwheeled through the air it sent Jack and Gabriel slamming from the seat to the ceiling and back again, the centrifugal force not enough to prevent it.

Somewhere amidst the bellowing from Gabe, his own periodic involuntary yelps as his injuries were jostled and jarred, and McCree’s surprisingly high-pitched screaming as he clutched his hat onto his head with a death grip, sometime after Gabriel’s knee made very solid contact with Jack’s forehead but before the armoured vehicle came to rest on its roof well off the road, Jack swore to himself that he would never again, so long as he lived, willingly get into a vehicle driven by Jesse McCree.

*** *** ***

The clinking scrape of the keyring spinning around McCree’s metal finger pulled Soldier Seventy-Six out of the memories that had caught him at the mere thought that he might be required to get in a car driven by the gunslinger ever again, a thing that he had sworn he would never do, especially after he had finally heard about the cowboy’s well-earned reputation for destroying anything with a steering wheel that he was tasked to operate.

He would tear off his own mask and give a worldwide-broadcast press conference to say that Jack Morrison had survived the destruction of the Overwatch Swiss Base before he would ever choose to break that particular vow. He had much more of a chance of coming out of that situation in the same number of pieces as he had gone in.

There were also Lúcio and Zarya to consider. They were also his captors seeing as they were obviously under McCree’s command, but they were both terribly young, and neither of them had even tried to be even so much as unkind to him so far. That, along with their being anti-Talon, made them ill-deserving of the kind of terror that was about to be wreaked upon them.

Soldier didn’t even bother to consider the idea that somewhere in the past decade-plus Jesse McCree might have beaten the curse that led to any car, truck, van, or other four-or-more-wheeled vehicle that the cowboy got behind the wheel of to be rendered into a smoking wreck. Such a thing was simply not possible.

Although he didn’t know what the reaction or consequence would be, Soldier briefly considered the idea of revealing who he had been to the trio just to keep McCree from driving. The idea did not appeal to him. While he had come, eventually, to see Reyes’ young protege as trustworthy as well as useful, the other two members of the team were were complete unknowns to him, as was whomever was waiting for them back at their base. Including the one that McCree had referred to as ‘the big guy’, who already had an interest in Soldier Seventy-Six, and who had already guessed that he was formerly a member of Overwatch before he was found using one of their old safehouses.

He may have been taken prisoner by this strange trio, but they had yet to even mention trying to remove his visor or mask from him. It was best, he decided, to continue to hang on to that advantage, slight though it was, for as long as possible.

There had to be another way. Soldier wracked his memory, trying to recall just how far — if at all — McCree’s reputation for vehicular destruction had spread within Overwatch, and if it might be reasonable for a random ex-member like Soldier appeared to be to know about it and be alarmed at the prospect of getting into a vehicle that the gunslinger was driving.

He knew that he had run out of time when McCree stopped by the rear doors of an older-model, somewhat beat-up looking cube van that had possibly at one point been blue and grey.

“Here we are,” McCree said, and unlocked the doors, swinging them wide open. “In you go,” he said to Soldier as he drew even with where the cowboy stood.

Soldier completely balked for the first time that night. The interior of the cube van was a dark, entirely too small, windowless metal box that seemed to constrict as he looked into it. And McCree still held the car keys. Something in Soldier’s chest locked up, hard and painful, and his breathing stuttered erratically.

Within a few hitched breaths as Soldier heard his pulse thundering rapidly, far too rapidly, in his ears, sudden understanding spread across McCree’s face. Turning slightly, he lobbed the keys at Zarya with a gentle underhand toss. She grounded the butt of her giant gun and caught them easily.

“Go turn on the interior lights,” McCree ordered, speaking fast, but in an easy, calm-sounding tone.

Zarya glanced at Soldier Seventy-Six clutching at the chest of his jacket, and hurried up to the driver’s door of the cube van. Holding her massive weapon with one hand, she unlocked and flung open the door, leaning inside to search for the ignition without actually getting into the vehicle.

Lúcio came up alongside Soldier. “What-” he started.

“Lú, do you have any o’ the special mixes ya put together for our Snowdrop along?” McCree interrupted urgently before the young man could do more than begin his question.

Lúcio’s gaze whipped from McCree to Soldier Seventy-Six and back again. “Oh! I gotcha.” He started fiddling with something on his wrist or on the side of his megaphone-gun hybrid, Soldier couldn’t tell as he wheezed and fought for air.

The interior lights of the cube van came on as Zarya found the ignition and shoved the key into it. The constricting blackness in front of him became a simple, bare metal box, the floor covered in anti-slip matting. Empty. Tall enough that he would only have to bend his back and his knees when he was inside, not crouch or huddle. Wide enough to almost spread his arms entirely.

As Soldier stared blankly into the newly illuminated space, Lúcio sidled up next to him and music reached out and wrapped around him. It was a soothing, gentle sound, with a subtle beat that reached deep into Soldier’s chest and somehow smoothed out his heart’s juddering, off-kilter thrashing into a more normal rhythm, and he felt his breathing start to fall into time with it as well as the painful, hard knot in his chest started to ease away.

For the first time, Soldier noticed that the music that constantly drifted from the young man hovering by his elbow with concern written large across his face was not only coming from speakers mounted in his leg armour, but also from smaller ones attached to his chest harness and, oddly, on the ends of his thick dreadlocks.

“You back with us, Soldier?” McCree asked as Seventy-Six slowly turned his head to look at Lúcio.

Soldier only grunted in reply, unsure whether the answer was yes or no, and unwilling to spend the words to say so.

“Close enough,” McCree decided aloud. He shifted to stand directly in Solder’s sight-line. “What d’you need for that to not be happinin’ again tonight?”

Soldier considered the question, and judged it to be — unexpectedly — genuine.

“No dark boxes,” he growled out through gritted teeth, hating to reveal the weakness, knowing that McCree would remember it, for good or ill. He left out mentioning his horror at thinking that McCree was going to drive, the music having somehow helped to clear his head enough for Seventy-Six to know that there would be no way to explain it without revealing who he had used to be.

He shoved away the memories that the unlit back of the cube van had summoned of huddling in the too-small space between cargo crates reeking of oil and smoke in inky blackness, praying that the crazed omnic squad tearing apart the shipping yard would bypass him, and the simultaneous, overlapping memory of waking up in the dark surrounded by the smell of blood, metal, and shattered concrete as best he could. There was nothing in those memories that could or would ever be wanted or useful to him. There had been no skill in his being able to wake up that terrible day, with no idea of whether he had been out for minutes, hours, or even days in a close, dark pile of wreckage and fire; only luck. Only luck in not being killed by the Greek omnics in the middle of the night as he hid and prayed that he wouldn’t be discovered. And Soldier had never actually relied on luck, no matter how reckless he had been accused of being back when he had been a different man.

McCree produced a cigarillo from a pocket somewhere under his serape, clamped it between his teeth, and lit it with a lighter he dug out of one of his front pants pockets with a thoughtful expression on his face.

“Well, that’s a thing,” the cowboy said, glancing into the back of the cube van. Shoving the lighter back into his pocket, he puffed on his cigarillo, his gaze flicking from the back of the van to Soldier and Lúcio. Finally he exhaled a cloud of smoke like a sigh. “Suppose you’ll have to ride shotgun, then,” he drawled through the masking tendrils. “You’ll haveta put up with some extra restraints in that case, then.”

Soldier, who had pretty much been expecting to be trussed up hand and foot and tossed into the van for being a nuisance with an impossible to fulfill requirement, was once again caught mentally flat-footed. Fortunately, his mask and visor hid the majority of whatever expression he was making from Lúcio and McCree, so he hoped that the full extent of just how flummoxed he was might be hidden.

“I- That’s fine,” Soldier managed, not sure what the right response was in the situation.

McCree nodded, and moved back. He paused by Lúcio, and leaned in close to the young man.

“Iff’n he tries to leave, throw him in the back and kill Snow’s tune,” McCree murmured softly, his voice so quiet that if it hadn’t been for Soldier’s enhanced hearing he would never have been able to make out the words.

Then the cowboy moved on, heading to where Zarya stood by the open driver’s door of the van, just slightly out of Soldier’s sight. He switched his visor over to heat signatures, finding that the four of them were thankfully the only people in range, though one of the cars parked across the street had been used recently enough that the engine block still glowed.

Going by what he could see of the heat signatures around the blocking side of the van, Zarya and McCree had a short conversation, then Zarya handed over something that had been either in one of her belt pouches or a pocket before McCree headed back over to where Soldier and Lúcio stood. As he did, Soldier turned off the heat signature mode hurriedly, to avoid having the bright spot from the cowboy’s burning cigarillo sear into his eyes.

As he drew close, McCree jerked his chin at Soldier, indicating that he should move up the passenger side of the van. Soldier went, though he was reluctant to move away from the music that had helped to relieve his panic attack so quickly. Somewhat to his relief, Lúcio drifted along behind him as he moved, keeping him just in range of hearing the soothing sound. Soldier also noticed that as he walked, he could hardly feel the pain from his side either, though it still didn’t feel healed. It was similar to the sensation from when the young man had skated around or past him as they had made their way from the safehouse to the van, but stronger, and Soldier guessed that it probably had something to do with how the skater was functioning so well with a significant hole in his leg.

“I’ll be needing your hands,” McCree said as they came up even with the passenger-side door. His tone was cautious.

Soldier took in the handcuffs dangling from McCree’s fingers. The idea was definitely not one that he liked, but he preferred it to the prospect of riding however far they had to go in the back. Attempting to escape at that point simply was not an option with his recent panic attack dragging at him, being nearly unarmed in a three versus one situation, and with having come so far already. Soldier held out his hands with a suppressed growl of distaste.

An expression of what Soldier was fairly certain was relief flicked across McCree’s face before he snapped the handcuffs around Seventy-Six’s wrists. They were good handcuffs, though they were obviously meant for un-enhanced people. Soldier could have snapped the hinge with a bit of effort, which was reassuring to him.

McCree swung the passenger door open. “In you go,” he said to Soldier with a sweeping gesture to the car seat. “Do up the belt.”

With some awkwardness thanks to the cuffs, Soldier climbed into the seat and did up the belt. Once he had done so, McCree huffed out another cloud of cigarillo smoke and produced a coil of zip-ties from one of his pockets.

“This ain’t gonna be all too comfortable,” the gunslinger said, separating a couple of ties from the roll, “but it won’t be for overlong, at least.”

As he spoke, he fastened one of the ties in a large loop around the handle of the door, then snagged the other around the chain of the handcuffs between Soldier’s hands and through the loop of the other, effectively tethering Seventy-Six to the door. Soldier’s side briefly spasmed with pain from the position it forced him into before McCree stepped aside and closed the door. It cut off the music from Lúcio almost entirely, reducing it to no more than a dulled hum of sound, and Soldier felt the weak, sick sensation that he always got after a panic attack rise through him. He brutally suppressed the urge to lean against the door beside him for support.

McCree walked away down the length of the van, his spurs jingling with each step. Zarya, who had been standing silently, leaning her hip against the still open driver’s side door, nodded and pushed herself upright again. Leaving the door open, she too made her way to the back of the cube van, leaving Soldier alone, tethered to the front seat.

“Good to go,” McCree said, clearly audible through the open back door. “You remember the directions from here?”

“I do,” Zarya answered, and Soldier felt the van bounce and then tilt as she stowed her massive energy weapon in the back, following it with his Pulse rifle from over her shoulder. “Take care, Lúcio, where those blades on your feet go,” she added.

“I’ll brace him, never fear,” McCree assured her. “He won’t be slidin’ into your gun.”

“Good.” She walked back up to the driver’s door as first Lúcio and then McCree climbed into the back, though McCree didn’t close the back door until Zarya was in her seat with her door closed and doing up her seatbelt.

Lúcio scrambled up the length of the van with a clatter to press himself against the back of Soldier’s seat, hitting it with a thump that Seventy-Six could feel. He was still playing the soothing music, and Soldier welcomed the relief that hearing it again brought to him.

After securing the rear door, McCree scooted up the van as well with much rattling of gear and scraping of spurs to settle, from the sound of it, next to Lúcio.

“Alright,” the cowboy said once he had found his seat, “let’s get gone of here.”

Zarya calmly turned on the van, glanced at her mirrors, and smoothly pulled into the street.

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An easter egg for finishing the chapter: Jesse McCree may be cursed to somehow destroy any car, truck, or van that he gets behind the wheel of, but the things that he can do on a motorbike when the mood strikes him would make professional stunt-people weep in jealousy and terror.


	3. Chapter Three

Although she frowned in deep concentration for the entire trip, Zarya drove well, signalling correctly and staying perfectly within the acceptable margins of the local speed limits. Soldier Seventy-Six approved. It was exactly the kind of driving one needed to do to make a clean, unremarkable getaway.

Behind Soldier, Lúcio hummed along with his music, apparently completely unperturbed by the discordant scrapes of McCree’s spurs on the metal floor in the back of the cube van as the cowboy braced himself against occasional rattles and tilts from the various corners and curves of the route.

It would have been a rather nice trip if Soldier was not actually a prisoner of the trio he was riding with, or if he had not been chained uncomfortably to the passenger-side door beside him.

Thankfully, it only took twenty-six minutes of driving for the buildings of the town to start thinning out. Soon after that, the buildings had fallen completely behind them, and they were driving on an otherwise empty road through quiet farmland.

Zarya let the van slow. “I need to know which field,” she said, the first words that any of them had spoken since the drive had begun.

“Got you,” Lúcio crooned in tune with his music. Soldier heard soft electronic noises behind him. “Keep on for a klick, then left,” the young man said. “I’ll call when it’s coming up.”

“Very well,” Zarya said, and kept driving.

They continued on like that for another eleven minutes, with Lúcio calling out occasional directions to Zarya for turns that she had to take until he said “This is the place. I’m sending the ping.”

Soldier looked at the bare dirt of the empty field they had pulled up to and frowned. They were late according to what Lúcio had said back at the safehouse about their pickup time. He wondered if the plane had simply been circling above, waiting for the signal to land.

“I’ll get the gate,” McCree said, sliding with a clatter to the back door of the van. He got out, shutting the door again behind him. He was briefly out of sight before he sauntered up to the fence Zarya had stopped in front of, flipping up a latch as he reached it to swing open an access gate.

As Zarya allowed the van to crawl forward into the field, a part of the empty air in front of them suddenly erupted with a horizontal line of white light that grew steadily in height before Soldier’s eyes. The air shimmered and almost seemed to flicker, and Seventy-Six realized that the light he was seeing was the hold doors of a transport plane opening as the gap grew wide enough to see the interior of the insanely well camouflaged carrier.

The cloaking technology was beyond anything Soldier had ever seen or heard of before, both before and after his former self had died. Until that moment, if he had been asked, he would have said that such a large projection — enough to cover a rather sizable plane and disguise it so that it seemed as if as if it wasn’t even there — was an impossibility with complete conviction. In the privacy of the low light and his mask, he gaped as a fully visible ramp touched down in front of the van, leading into a cargo-carrying interior hold that hung in shimmering, empty air.

“Man, that is really gonna drain the batteries,” Lúcio said, his tone worried. “We’d better get loaded quickly.” He had moved while Soldier was distracted, kneeling on the floor between the two front seats of the van so that he could see over the dashboard.

Zarya’s jaw visibly tightened, and Soldier noticed as she forced herself to relax the death grip she had on the wheel. “Let us get this done,” she growled through gritted teeth, and rolled the van forward at a slow, steady pace, right at the ramp.

“You got this, Zar,” Lúcio said encouragingly, and patted her visibly tensed bicep as the van’s wheels met the incline. She nodded jerkily.

McCree hustled quickly up the ramp beside the van, and hurried into the hold. Once he was inside, he turned to face the van that was slowly and carefully edging up the ramp, and gave them a double thumbs-up. A very slight amount of tension bled out of Zarya’s jaw at the gesture, and she leaned a little back from where she had started to hunch over the wheel, craning to see ahead of the van’s front bumper.

Looking ahead as the van picked up speed under McCree’s direction, Soldier saw that the grey floor of the plane’s hold was clearly marked in blue paint. The van was following a pair of lines that led to a set of four rectangles that were, as far as he could judge, spaced at the same distance apart as the projecting hover mounts of the van. Off to the side, nearer to where McCree was standing, there were two large squares marked close enough together to have to be for the same thing, and beyond the cowboy Seventy-Six could just barely see a puzzling assortment of various rectangles. This was, he guessed, a plane that was used to transport a variety of specific objects locked down while in flight, though beside the van that he was currently inside what those objects were was something of a mystery.

With McCree providing extra guidance, the van soon settled into the place intended for it with a soft thump. Zarya shut down the engine and kneaded at the back of her neck with both hands, closing her eyes.

“You okay?” Soldier asked without thinking.

Behind them, the van’s back door opened, and there was the sound of Lúcio getting out, the whir of his skates unmistakable.

Zarya huffed lightly, a sound that was not quite a sigh, and undid her seatbelt. “Memories of battle,” she said slowly, “they are not... You cannot choose when they touch you.” She pressed a finger to the top of the cross-shaped scar on her forehead that bisected her eyebrow. “I got this when omnics attacked my troop carrier as it was being unloaded. I sat where you sit now that day.”

“Ah. I understand.” Soldier poured as much of his knowing what such things were like into his voice as he could. It wasn’t hard, given his aborted panic attack earlier, and the sick feeling that had returned when Lúcio and his music had left the vehicle.

Zarya surveyed him silently for long moments. “Yes. I believe that you do,” she said finally, conviction in her tone. Then she gave him the ghost of a nod — just a dip of her chin — before she got out of the vehicle.

Soldier glanced down at his handcuffed wrists, wondering if he was going to be spending the flight tied to the passenger-side door of the van in the hold. It seemed likely, given how he had been abandoned. He regretted ever having agreed to being restrained, even though it had kept him from having to ride in the back.

He was just considering snapping the cuffs, diving for his Heavy Pulse Rifle in the back of the van and committing whatever mayhem he had to in order to get out of his captivity when the passenger side door was carefully opened a small amount and McCree leaned in, holding an oddly familiar-looking multi-tool in his hand.

“Time to change seats,” the cowboy said, and cut one of the loops that tied the cuffs to the door. “Go with Lúcio. He has the keys, an’ he’ll get you set up with a seat for takeoff while we get the net on this heap.”

Soldier hurried to undo his seatbelt and slid out of the vehicle as soon as McCree moved out of the way. Looking around, he saw Lúcio by an interior door of the hold, holding up a gleaming, metallic glint that resolved into handcuff keys when Seventy-Six squinted to make his visor zoom in.

McCree turned away from him as soon as he was facing in the right direction, moving with a distinct jingle to each step to kick open a long, low storage locker along the wall nearest to the van. Somewhat dumbfounded at the sudden show of nonchalance, Soldier simply made his way over to Lúcio.

The young man smiled up at Soldier as he joined him. “This way!” he said, swinging open the door.

Marvelling slightly at just how short the skater was once he was standing right next to him in proper lighting and without the distraction of not being able to breathe, Soldier went through, into what proved to be a personnel seating area. Eighteen seats were arranged nine to a side along what was little more than an especially wide hallway that stretched from the door they had entered by to another, firmly closed door at the other end. Most of the seats were decommissioned, he noticed, the backs still attached to the wall but the actual seats gone, leaving only eight still in usable condition.

As Lúcio slid into the room, the lights suddenly flicked and brightened.

“Oh good, the cargo door’s shut,” Lúcio said, reaching for Soldier’s cuffed hands, “that’ll give the batteries a rest,” he continued as he unlocked them.

Soldier made a show of rubbing his newly freed wrists, wishing that he had his gloves on to hide his lack of any red marks. “That camouflage is something else,” he ventured. “Never seen any so good before.”

Lúcio had skated further into the room as Soldier spoke, and turned to shoot Seventy-Six a glance that was hard to read. “Brand new tech,” he said with a strange twist of his mouth. “A special collaboration. We’re the only ones who have it in the world.”

“Who are ‘we’, exactly?” Soldier asked after a pause to consider whether it was a good idea to try asking at all.

“Take any seat you want,” Lúcio said with an expansive hand gesture as if the words had never left Soldier’s mouth. “The ones up front are the loudest, but they’re the least broken.”

Given the day that he had been having, Soldier found that he appreciated the complete lack of subtlety in the skater’s lack of an answer. He tilted his head in thought for a moment, and decided not to press the question. It would be answered soon enough, for good or ill.

Soldier headed for a seat where he could see and be seen over the entire space and settled with a suppressed sigh, crossing his arms over his chest as he leaned back. His actions seemed to reassure Lúcio, who also took a seat, across the overly large aisle and much closer to the door to the cargo hold than the one that Seventy-Six had chosen.

The young man did not seem inclined to conversation, staying quiet as he adjusted something in a panel on the inside of his wrist while keeping an eye on Soldier. For his own part, Soldier preferred to mentally pick at the question of just what McCree was up to, so he made no attempt to start talking again either. In any case, Lúcio had made it abundantly clear that he would not really be answering any of Soldier’s questions, and he had never been any good at small talk even in the best of circumstances — which definitely was not the situation he found himself in.

“ _How can you be so good at keeping up everybody’s morale, but be so incredibly bad at basic social niceties?_ ” the ghost of Gabriel in his memories asked in an amused tone.

The two sat in near silence save for the faint sound of Lúcio’s music playing for thirty-one minutes before the cargo hold door opened again and McCree and Zarya came in. The time got Soldier no closer to coming up with a plausible explanation for what he had gotten caught by.

McCree thumbed a button on the intercom panel beside the door. “Cargo’s strapped down an’ everyone’s on board,” he said. “We’re good to go.”

“Very well,” a tinny-sounding tenor came from the intercom in response almost immediately. “Takeoff will be in ten minutes. I recommend that you all buckle up.” The voice had a calm, easy meter to it, although Soldier thought that there seemed to be something omnic to the inflictions.

“Y’all heard him,” McCree said, going to drop into a seat that wasn’t quite directly across from Soldier’s. “Buckle up.”

They all got to work on their seatbelts, and Soldier felt the deep hum of the carrier’s engines spinning up.

When the takeoff came, it was almost vertical by the feel of it, and unexpectedly swift, pressing Soldier hard into his seat. The carrier was obviously very powerful, more so than Soldier had expected from it’s scuffed, worn interior. The strength of the g-force pushed at Soldier’s injured side painfully, and he noticed that Lúcio was visibly gritting his teeth.

Once the powerful upward thrust ended and a much more tolerable horizontal one took its place, the intercom made a popping noise as it activated again.

“We are underway,” the tinny tenor announced. “I am able to come assist the wounded now, if I can be of any use.”

Soldier watched as the formidable muscles in Zarya’s shoulders visibly locked solid.

“Nah,” McCree said easily, starting to undo his seatbelt. “Nothin’ you can do that the Music-Man isn’t doin’ already.” As the cowboy stood, he switched seamlessly into speaking Spanish, a language that Soldier had finally picked up in the years that he had been bouncing around Central and South America breaking up arms dealers and gangs with ties to Talon. “ _Better to stay where you are, Z is already worked up and our surprise guest is probably an old veteran. Stay out of sight._ ”

Soldier, who had understood most of what the cowboy had said despite the rapid delivery, licked the scar through his lip thoughtfully. It seemed that his thinking that there was something omnic in the way the pilot spoke had not been far off of the mark. Nor had his guess that Zarya was Russian, given her reaction.

“Understood,” the pilot answered.

McCree stretched, and headed for the door. “Unlock the command pod an’ put a line through for me, wilya?” he asked. “I’ve got to talk to the big guy.”

“Of course,” the pilot said.

The lock on the door released, apparently triggered by the pilot, and McCree vanished through the door, closing it firmly behind him.

A long few moments passed before Zarya shifted noisily, drawing Soldier’s attention.

“Come.” She waved at him to move nearer. “Sit closer to Lúcio. It will be a long flight, you should make use of the music.”

Lúcio nodded and smiled, though the expression was still a little strained from the swift takeoff. “Yeah man, no need to sit over there hurting the whole way.”

There really was no reason not to take them up on the offer. Soldier undid his seatbelts and made his way over, settling on the opposite side of Lúcio from Zarya, with an empty seat between them. The strange pain-killing effect of the music swept over him immediately, and he let out a silent sigh at the sudden relief.

After he had taken a couple of deep breaths, Seventy-Six remembered himself. “Thanks,” he grunted.

“No big.” Lúcio waved a hand with a faint smile. “Doesn’t drain the power any more for two than for just me.”

*** *** ***

The flight lasted for two hours and forty-three minutes, which McCree spent nearly an hour of in the command pod before returning to the personnel compartment. He eyed Soldier’s change in position with an unreadable expression, then went to sit in the seat that Soldier had vacated, stretching out his long legs to cross them at the ankles, and pulling out a tablet to steadily flick through for the rest of the time, his hat pulled low over his eyes.

Soldier spent most of the flight with his arms crossed tightly over his chest, half-dozing as he tried to get what rest he could while he was still under the pain-killing influence of Lúcio’s unusual music. It was a luxury that had, he had thought, been denied him forever since the SEP had sped up his metabolism to the point of his simply burning through conventional medicines with appalling speed. Gabriel, with the persistent ache in his joints from the push and pull of his too-heavy bones and his need for mega-doses of painkillers to even start to feel the effect would have been sprawled across the nearest soft-ish person — probably Soldier or Zarya, given Lúcio’s leg armour and McCree’s distance — purring like a pampered house-cat if he had been there instead of blown apart and dead for just over ten years.

It hurt to remember just how long it had been since everything had come to its crushed, burning end. A decade dead and in his grave, and Soldier Seventy-Six was no closer to carving out the heart of Talon as they had done to Overwatch than he had been when he had started.

Soldier breathed deep, and got what rest he could.

*** *** ***

The plane taxied for some time after it landed, most likely driving into some sort of hangar, Soldier decided. It took a great deal of both money and influence to get people to look the other way from obviously military planes parked out in the open, and he doubted that the remarkable camouflage was generally left running while the plane was charging.

The feeling of movement stopped, and not long after that Seventy-Six heard the engines powering down, making the lights flicker.

“End o’ the road,” McCree said, undoing his seatbelts and standing up.

Zarya quickly followed suit. Soldier waited until she was on her feet before going for his own seatbelt buckles. Lúcio rose shortly after Seventy-Six, fiddling with the controls on the panel at his wrist as he did.

“Out through cargo,” McCree ordered, and the group exited into the cargo bay and past the van, thoroughly clamped in place and with a shipping net over it.

McCree strode over to the door controls, speaking as he thumbed the button. “Alright, _chica grande_ , you take Daredevil to medical, while I-”

A sound, a faint pop followed by the electronic hum that many omnics used in place of throat-clearing, interrupted the cowboy from the intercom speaker by the door control.

“The guardian is in the hangar today,” the omnic pilot said. “They are currently blue, but on alert and covering this plane.”

Zarya made an abortive movement toward the van, but McCree stopped her with a negative hand gesture.

“Well then,” the gunslinger said as the cargo door finished opening, “thanks for the heads-up.”

“My pleasure,” the pilot hummed. “I did not wish for you to be unprepared.”

McCree sighed and tugged at the cuff of the glove that covered his remaining original hand. “Alerted, of all the fool...” he muttered, low enough that Soldier only just caught the words. He waved to Zarya and Lúcio. “Best you two go first, they know the both of ya. Iffn’ you’re both calm, probably Soldier Seventy-Six here won’t be too much of an issue.”

Zarya nodded stiffly, her face unhappy, and stalked down the ramp. Just she reached the bottom and Lúcio started to follow, Soldier heard a series of sounds that he had thought he would never hear again that made his blood run cold.

A distinct, clicking whir, followed by a metal clunk-ka-clunk, and another, much fainter whir that was almost a buzz.

“Take cover!” Soldier roared purely on instinct, and threw himself behind the partial cover offered by the corner of the van.

It was very common for Bastion unit turrets and gatlings to be cannibalized and re-purposed by enterprising criminals since the Crisis had ended and the war machines had all shut down, however the rebuilt mechanisms never sounded like what Soldier had just heard. No reload belt could ever sound like a priming servo moving, and if the re-builder had even bothered to put the turret rotator back together it took on an entirely different character and sound from the process.

McCree’s hand whipped to his hat and he gave a jerk at Soldier’s roared command, but he otherwise stayed where he was.

“It is in turret,” Zarya’s voice came, mostly calm-sounding, albeit with a slight edge to her words. Soldier couldn’t see her from where he was.

“Still blue, though,” Lúcio added. He was standing at the bottom of the ramp, his hands on his hips.

“See if you can coax them upright, willya Monkeyfrog?” McCree called down to him, his hand dropping away from his hat.

Lúcio gave a small wave, and skated out of Soldier’s sight. Faintly, Seventy-Six heard the young man call out “Hey B, how are your chickens today?” before he was out of hearing range.

Soldier rounded on McCree while still staying covered by the corner of the van and willing his visor to reconnect with his gun faster. “Your hangar guard is a Bastion!”

“Sure is,” McCree agreed. “Last workin’ unit on the planet.”

“There is. A working Bastion unit. In your hangar,” Soldier clarified.

“They’ve got a few wires crossed,” McCree said, “so they ain’t much of a danger ‘less you make yourself a danger to them first.” He paused a moment. “Or if someone lackin’ a little fore-thought tells them the plane’s gonna come back carrying a possible threat to the base,” he admitted.

“You keep a malfunctioning Bastion unit on base?” Soldier asked incredulously.

McCree shrugged. “You’d rather we had one that was right in their head?” He took in Soldier’s defensive position and stance. “Look, so long’s you’re with one o’ us, and nobody starts shootin’, the Bastion’s no threat.”

Soldier considered the gunslinger’s words and the situation. A working Bastion was beyond being an anomaly. They were a complex mass of input-response algorithms, but ultimately the units only existed to carry out the very straightforward commands of their parent God Program: go to a selected place, kill everything that wasn’t another omnic. When the God Programs had been stopped, the Bastions and the other specific war units like the OR- machines and the dog-shaped Slicers had ground to a stop as well. And unlike the Slicers or the OR- units, no one, omnic or otherwise, had found a way to re-activate the Bastions as anything more than vaguely mobile turrets with no friend-foe distinction. Only Null Sector had ever even bothered to do that much, it being far faster and easier to simply tear the things down for parts. A working Bastion, let alone one functioning without orders should have been impossible.

As far as Seventy-Six knew, only three God Programs so far had woken up when the Overwatch network had gone down, and the plane definitely could not have flown far enough to enter the area of influence of any of them in the time they had taken, nor had any of the awake God Programs he knew of favoured churning out Bastions the way that the European ones had. Thus, either there was another God Program awake that miraculously didn’t want the entire human race to be utterly destroyed, or the Bastion in the hangar was somehow functioning independently.

Soldier wasn’t sure which prospect was more concerning.

Out in the hangar, he heard the complicated sequence of whirring, clanking, and moving gears that he recognized as the sound of a Bastion unfolding from turret mode to bipedal recon mode. Soldier looked to McCree, who still stood by the controls for the plane’s cargo door, completely unconcerned. The sound hadn’t even made the cowboy flinch.

The mystery of the Bastion unit aside, Soldier decided that he would not, could not, believe that McCree would ever have allowed his team to simply walk half unarmed into certain death. The young gunslinger played his cards incredibly close to his chest, but Soldier knew of his loyalty and sense of responsibility to those he considered his own.

“ _Fuck’s sake, I didn’t keep your skinny ass out of prison just so you could get it blown off trying to keep my hide in one piece, you ungrateful shit,_ ” Reyes snarled in a memory from a different hangar, practically glowing with his anger.

The memory of a much younger McCree bared blood-covered teeth. “ _I thought that was what you wanted me for!_ ” he snapped back. “ _I had the shot so I took it! No one gives a fuck if I go down so long’s you don’t!_ ”

“I _give a fuck! One less scar on me ain’t worth your life, you ingrate!_ ”

No, McCree would take the bullet himself rather than stand by and let his team die.

Soldier dropped his hand from his visor and blinked away the targeting functions that he had been trying to use to to figure out where in the van his Pulse Rifle was and which way it was facing, and cautiously left his cover to descend the cargo plane’s ramp, followed closely by McCree.

The hangar was cavernous, a massive space meant to hold far more than the three planes Soldier could see. At least half of the space wasn’t even lit, the lights turned off or disabled. By the edge of the full light, with a direct line of sight on the ramp to the cargo plane, a Bastion unit unfolded into its bipedal sentry form loomed over Lúcio’s much lesser height, beeping and whistling away while the skater nodded. Just beyond them, Soldier saw a military-grade Hummer, an older model, with its hood up and a portion of its engine laid out neatly on a greasy tarp on the floor.

One of the planes, a massive, hulking football of a thing that Soldier could have sworn was an Orca was also non-functional; the nearer engine had its outer casing off and had been partially taken apart, and the tail was missing the rudder flap.

McCree waved Soldier toward one of the hangar’s interior doors. Zarya stood by it, her arms crossed over her chest as she glared at the Bastion unit, visibly bristling. Seventy-Six headed toward her.

“Time to mosey, Music-Man,” McCree called. “Good job guardin’ there, Bastion,” he added, “you can go back to your usual, we’ve got this here.”

The Bastion whistled in a way that could only be described as ‘cheerful’, and swung around to clank off into the darkness of the unlit portion of the hangar with a strangely childlike wave goodbye — it’s single hand curling and uncurling from a fist to flat and back again. The blue light of its optical receiver lit its path all the way to another door, which slid open to a dimly lighted hallway and then closed behind the omnic. Both Soldier and Zarya relaxed as it clicked shut.

As Lúcio started over to join McCree, Soldier caught sight of some more vehicles parked by the Hummer. What appeared to be a handful of ATVs clustered deep in the shadows, but what caught his attention were the motorbikes that had been given prominent place in the light, their charging indicators gleaming faintly. In fact, one, a sleek little Japanese-looking model, seemed to have been carefully placed specifically so that the lights would strike its iridescent green finish at the perfect angle and cast the scuffed-up black and blue one behind it into shadow. The bulky chopper the colour of a black cherry next to the showy machine practically looked like an immovable hulk in comparison, but for the fact that Soldier knew a powerful motorcycle when he saw one. It was the third bike, a hulking, well-used and patchily repaired low-rider with a bulbous, bright yellow sidecar that gave him pause. He was sure that he should recognize it, somehow. Soldier was quite sure that he had never seen the bike before, he would remember it especially because it was equipped with tires — which were practically unheard of since the world had completely switched over to hover-tech like the other bikes had many, many years ago, but the sense of knowing the bike niggled at him as he stared at the one-eyed smiley face painted on the sidecar.

He lost his train of thought entirely as he neared the door that Zarya was waiting beside. The base had an unusually strong wifi signal, though it was secured and passworded, and Soldier was distracted from trying to remember the low-rider motorbike by dismissing its attempt to connect with his visor. Even as he dismissed it, another signal took its place, a short-range ping connection that identified itself only as **tokki** , with a signal that grew stronger when he was directly facing a large, tarpaulin-covered rounded hulk that sat between the motorbikes and the door with a thick cable coming out from under the tarp and plugged into one of the plane charging stations.

Soldier’s steps lagged as he attempted to get his visor to discreetly convince the ping to stop attempting to connect, allowing McCree to pass him. Then, just as Seventy-Six managed to either get the ping to stop or moved out of its range, the base wifi returned with an insistent push demand for him to connect immediately.

As Soldier dismissed it, dismissed it again, and finally set about navigating the hands-free menu to temporarily shut down his visor’s wifi connection entirely, McCree keyed the door open and strode through. Still distracted, Soldier followed, leaving Zarya and Lúcio to bring up the rear.

It was foolish, verging on stupid, to be wandering deeper into his captors’ stronghold without being fully alert to his surroundings. He realized the extent of his mistake as he blinked away the last of his visor’s connection menus just in time to see McCree step slightly sideways to reveal a woman standing in the middle of the hallway, waiting for them.

Mercy.

Soldier Seventy-Six stopped dead in his tracks.

Angela Ziegler, looking exactly the same as she had the first day that she had walked through Overwatch’s doors and into her own lab, the only difference being the bright gold of her halo visor rising over the ponytail in her flaxen hair, strange and incongruous with her dark slacks, pale grey blouse, and lab coat, turning up her cheek to accept McCree’s kiss on it in greeting.

It was all Seventy-Six could do to not hurl himself to his knees at her feet and beg for her forgiveness.

“ _You should be dead!_ ” a blood-flecked, pain-wracked voice shrieked in his memory. “ _The bombs should have blown both of you monsters to pieces the moment you tried to leave that room!_ ”

There was no forgiving for what he had taken from her, he knew. It didn’t make not even asking for it sit any easier.

“You’re our welcome wagon today, Angie?” McCree drawled to her.

“When one of you is injured badly enough to force your team to quit the field without finishing your mission, I am,” Mercy answered, giving the cowboy a quick head-to-toe scan with a flick-flick-flick of her eyes. Her voice was warm, but Soldier caught the undercurrent of concern.

Collecting himself from the shock of seeing Mercy and the bile from his memories, Seventy-Six was thankful — not for the first time that day — that his visor completely concealed his eyes, thus preventing anyone from seeing where he was looking as he discreetly and thoroughly checked the area they stood in. Setting aside Zarya and Lúcio, whoever they were, and why either of them was involved, if McCree was present and Doctor Ziegler was also tangled up in whatever anti-Talon activities that the trio that had captured him had been involved in when they had stumbled across him, it was more than likely that the other remaining Blackwatch demon was around as well. And Genji was unlikely to be all that far away from Mercy when she was going to be within reach of a dangerous stranger, supposedly unarmed prisoner or not. Angela had always seemed to bring out the young cyborg’s otherwise nonexistent protective streak.

Worryingly, Soldier could find no sign at all of the man, not even a lingering heat signature.

Mercy turned her attention from McCree to Seventy-Six, giving him a much more thorough visual check than she had the cowboy. Soldier noticed that her hand never left her large lab coat pocket as she did, and he guessed that she had a gun in it. The other pocket bulged somewhat, and he could just barely make out something green in it. A scarf, perhaps, or some surgical gloves.

“So, this is Soldier Seventy-Six,” she commented as she finished looking him over. “After so much time tracking him, it would be luck alone that finally led to him.” She shook her head, her expression wry, but with a tightness in the corners of her mouth that told Soldier that the highly advanced medical scanning technology in her halo visor had definitely pointed out his injury to her.

She dismissed him completely, however, once Lúcio, followed by Zarya, skated into range of her detailed scans.

Mercy’s blue eyes went wide, and she dashed past Soldier Seventy-Six so quickly that her shoes made a distressed and somehow surprised sounding squeak as she went. So quickly that Soldier found himself checking for the soft glow of the hover-wings that Torbjörn had made for her so long ago, and surprised himself with both their absence and the continuing existence of the instinct to look for them.

“Lúcio!” she called out, even though she was already most of the way to him. “You should not be walking with such an injury!”

“We din’ have much choice,” McCree said, loud enough for everyone in the hall to hear.

Lúcio nodded in agreement. “And the armour’s holding things together well enough with the music to keep my blood on the inside,” he added.

Soldier had not realized that the skater’s music was what had apparently kept the young man from bleeding out. He had assumed that it was some new form of nano-tech that Seventy-Six had not encountered before. Then again, he had no idea how the music had produced such an effective painkilling effect either, or how it had soothed away his panic attack earlier as easily as it had.

Mercy’s gaze narrowed sharply on Lúcio, gaining a laser-like intensity. “You have been limiting your circulation rather than bandaging yourself?” Her words came out with only the faintest lilt upward at the end to make it a question rather than a statement.

Soldier recognized her tone. He had heard it often, years ago, in a different life.

Lúcio leaned against the wall, waving at some part of his thigh as he carefully tilted his injured leg. “The bullet bent this latch,” he explained. “We couldn’t get it open to bandage my leg, not without maybe breaking the armour so I couldn’t’ve put it back on.”

“And how long have you been preventing your proper blood flow?” Mercy asked, her voice as cold and crisp as new-fallen snow.

Soldier caught McCree’s wince in his peripheral vision.

“Ah, ha, not so long, not so long,” Lúcio answered with a faint strain in his tone. His eyes had gone a little wider. “I’ve only had to loop the song a few-”

“About seven and a half hours, plus however long they took to get to the safehouse after he got shot,” Soldier interrupted, knowing that Lúcio would only make it worse for himself the longer that he continued to try to avoid answering Mercy’s question, especially when she had asked it in that icy tone.

Mercy went utterly still at his words, but everyone else in the hallway turned to stare at Soldier Seventy-Six.

“... Chronometer,” he said, pointing at his visor, despite the fact that he had disabled the clock display completely within hours of having stolen it from Grand Mesa years before.

The single word explanation was apparently enough. Lúcio’s attention went back to Mercy’s entirely still form, and the frown that had been forming between Zarya’s brows smoothed out. McCree’s expression had not changed and did not change, but Soldier got the feeling that the cowboy had gone back to dividing his attention between Mercy and himself.

“You have been preventing proper blood flow to your extremities for over eight hours.” Mercy’s hand shot out, seizing Lúcio by the wrist and pulling his hand to her as she used her free hand to move and manipulate his fingers in an assessing way. “You will be lucky to still have toes to try to wiggle!” she snapped. “Lúcio, I have warned you of the danger of doing this, why can you not listen?”

“I listen, Mercy, I do,” Lúcio hastened to assure her, suddenly sounding so young. “I hear every word you say. But we didn’t have much choice.”

“No, I suppose you did not,” Mercy sighed, and released his wrist. She looked up at Zarya. “Would you take him to the medbay?” she asked. “He should stay off that leg, hopefully we can limit further damage that way.” She paused with a sigh. “And I suspect we may have need of your strength to get through the damaged latch,” she added.

Zarya nodded. “As you say, Doctor.” With that, the large woman simply scooped up Lúcio into a bridal carry and stomped off further into the base with him in her arms, ignoring his indignant squawk as easily as she did the weight of the young man and all of his gear as she went.

Mercy shook her head as the pair vanished around a corner, her expression warring between concerned and faintly amused.

“Orderin’ my team about,” McCree complained, just a little too theatrically to be genuine. “Whate’er happened to chain o’ command ‘round here?”

“Irrelevant,” Mercy shot back, pointing at his face. “You are back on base, and there are wounded. Which- Oh yes,” she interrupted herself, turning to face Soldier Seventy-Six again. “I am sorry,” she said to him, “but you must wait for treatment. Lúcio’s injury, and whatever he has done to himself must be dealt with first.”

“No problem there, Angie,” McCree said. “He’s for talkin’ to the big guy first thing anyway.”

Something complicated flitted across Mercy’s face. “Ah yes, of course,” she said, as if McCree had just commented on the grey colour of the walls. “But he will of course be staying beyond that. Bring him to the medbay after the three of you are done with him.”

Soldier did not miss the slight quirk of McCree’s nearly hidden eyebrow when Mercy said ‘the three of you’, although the cowboy made no comment on it. He only touched the brim of his hat and said “I’ll be sure to bring him by once the talkin’s done, Angie.”

Mercy nodded, and turned to give Soldier another, somewhat quicker scan. “You appear to have bandaged yourself well enough,” she said to him. “Your condition most likely will not worsen before you can receive treatment.” She smiled suddenly, like the sun breaking through the clouds. “I will be seeing you soon, Soldier,” she assured him, and then she turned and vanished down the hall and around the same corner as Zarya had carried Lúcio to.

“Well, looks like you’re in our angel’s good graces already,” McCree commented. “Lucky for you, your first aid’s up to her standards.”

“She hasn’t changed at all,” Soldier found himself saying, to his surprise and dismay. He had not realized how seeing Angela again, seeing her still exactly the same as she was in the decades-old memories of a dead man, had shaken him so badly.

“The world’ll start spinnin’ the opposite way an’ the sun’ll rise in the west before Mercy ever changes,” McCree chuckled, his tone fond. He turned on his heel, heading for a different corner than the one that the others had used. “This way,” he directed. “The boss is mighty eager to be talkin’ to you.”

Despite his misgivings, Soldier followed him, there being no other choice.

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Once again, have an easter egg for finishing the chapter: The shoes that Mercy was wearing in this chapter absolutely do not squeak. At all. Never have, and never will.
> 
> Heh.


	4. Chapter Four

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, the version of Soldier 76 that is in this story does have a racial recognition blind spot that encompasses most of an entire continent and the Middle East, and that blind spot is going to be showing in this chapter. Absolutely no insult is intended.

Following McCree as he led the way through uniformly grey halls and past various identical doors, Soldier Seventy-Six became certain that they were in some sort of captured or abandoned military base and he wondered, yet again, just what the organization McCree — and Mercy — had gotten involved with was up to, and just how organized it was.

Five minutes into their walk, Soldier’s visor suddenly informed him that his Heavy Pulse Rifle was attempting to connect. Which was impossible, seeing as they were heading away from the hangar, and if anyone had started following them Soldier would have heard and seen them if they had been carrying his gun close enough for it to attempt a connection.

Soldier eyed the connection attempt for several more steps thoughtfully. There was a vague possibility that he and McCree had passed an armoury and an even less likely chance that there was a Pulse Rifle of the model that his Heavy Pulse Rifle had been originally based on in said armoury. The problem with believing that possibility, however, was the vanishingly faint likelihood of both those things being the case on top of the possible other Pulse Rifle having been left on and pinging for no apparent reason. It was far more likely that some clever would-be hacker was trying to get access to his visor by pretending to be his gun.

It was a tricky, sneaky move, and one that might have worked if the communication between Soldier’s gun and his visor had been the more average type for pulse weaponry. If the information exchanged in Soldier’s setup had only been internal temperature readings and the number of shots left, it would have been easy to use the signal to sneak in. It was only thanks to Seventy-Six’s Heavy Pulse Rifle being a very special model and to Soldier’s having pushed what the gun and his visor could do in tandem with each other to the absolute limit of what his skill could coax out of the tech that the infiltration attempt failed.

With an annoyed snarl that he only just barely managed to catch behind his teeth, Soldier set about turning off his visor’s bluetooth connections, which since it was considered a basic always-on-and-ignored sort of function was buried in a protracted series of sub-menus, and the process was made all the slower by his being too cautious to touch his visor’s external controls and alert McCree to his doing anything other than walking, confining him to a long, slow series of blink commands. Thus, he heard the two voices murmuring back and forth in debate between them over which load-bearing walls could or could not be ignored significantly before he could look to see where they were coming from.

The corridor he and McCree had recently turned in to had more doors than the previous halls, which indicated to Seventy-Six that they had most likely entered the area of the base devoted to briefing and meeting rooms, as well as offices. It only made sense, given that he was also fairly certain by that point that McCree was leading him to the base Command Centre. As he blinked away the last of the menus blocking his sight, Soldier saw that the way had also opened up somewhat while he had been blocking his visor’s access ports. Occasional alcoves were disbursed along the walls: water-cooler areas and waiting rooms that had once had padded benches along the walls though, like the plane, many of the cushions had been stripped from the seats. One of the alcoves they passed had a projection unit, the screen hanging crookedly on the wall. The way the lights sheened over it in strange, wavering patterns indicated that it had warped. Soldier caught a flicker of movement and spotted a brindle-coloured cat stretched out under one of the stripped benches at its ease, its tail beating to a slow rhythm only it could hear.

Soldier eyed another alcove serving as an open kitchenette, complete with a spotlessly clean forty-eight cup coffeemaker and a row of teapots — one set apart from the others with a bright orange and brown knitted cozy over it. The command centre was certain to be nearby.

The two voices had been growing steadily nearer, a man and a woman from the sound of them, both heavily, although differently, accented. The debate about load-bearing walls had something to do with entry points, and though the two were definitely not arguing with each other, they seemed to have rather differing opinions on what an acceptable entry point was.

The discussion emanated from an alcove ahead, and Soldier could see a shifting light shining from there as well.

There was no way that McCree could not have noticed the discussion or where it was coming from, but he made no motion to shift their path further away or to hurry his steps. Perhaps, Soldier considered, the people talking in the alcove were the ones that he was being taken to.

“The door to the roof will not be guarded,” the woman’s voice said. “Without a helipad being there, they will see no need to.”

“There is the matter of getting to the roof without being noticed,” the man countered as Soldier and McCree drew up to the alcove. “And the decent through-”

The man, a short, barrel-chested Asian — probably Japanese, Soldier guessed — with a handsome, severe face with a bridge piercing and prominent cheekbones that could have cut glass well framed by the spiky grey streaks at the temples of his loose, chin-length black hair, cut his words off with a snap as soon as he laid eyes on Soldier Seventy-Six. Soldier watched as the man’s very impressive pectorals tensed slightly beneath the tight fabric of his black, long-sleeved t-shirt as he shifted subtly so that he stood more between Soldier and the woman beside him.

The woman, an Indian or Pakistani from the look of her, with her hair pulled back tightly from her pretty, long-nosed face wearing a pristine pale gold sari edged with sunset orange who held herself like royalty, looked at Soldier Seventy-Six silently for a moment before she reached down with a gleaming white and blue metal arm and disrupted the projector for the at least fifteen year old 3D display table she was standing at. The wire-frame model of a building and the variously coloured tags it had been marked with dissolved into visual static. The precise folds of the fabric draped over the woman’s shoulder barely shifted from her motion.

Soldier was struck by the bright gold of her eyes, an uncommon colour for the part of the world she appeared to be from as far as he knew, but her metal arm quickly became much more fascinating once he got a good look at it. The sleek, almost seamless-looking design of it combined with its distinctive colours and the briefly visible flash of glass-sheened blue in the palm as she had disrupted the projector were unmistakably the work of the Vishkar Corporation, and Vishkar did not simply sell their highly specialized hard light prosthetics.

The subtle, velvet threat that the Japanese man was radiating was nothing compared to knowing that he was seeing a Vishkar architech standing in front of him, utterly calm and unrestrained. There was something going on between Vishkar and Talon, Soldier knew, something subtle and difficult to trace. They weren’t actually connected to each other, not exactly, as far as Soldier had been able to determine, but they also never seemed to step on each other’s toes, so to speak, in their various operations. Such a thing, especially over the course of as many years as Soldier had been paying attention, was simply to consistent to be coincidental.

Soldier didn’t know what to think anymore. McCree had been a surprise back at the safehouse to be sure, an actual, functioning Bastion unit, let alone a friendly one, had been a terrible shock, and seeing Mercy again had been something of an emotional gut-shot, but the presence of a Vishkar employee, let alone one of their precious, rare architechs, identifiable as such since they were the only ones with hard light artificial arms, pulled the floor out from under Seventy-Six, throwing everything he had thought he had figured out into question. He was adrift again, with far fewer answers than he had thought he had.

“Evenin’ Firefly,” McCree greeted, touching the brim of his hat. “Legolas,” he added a breath later, his voice a degree cooler.

“Mister McCree,” the woman said. “You have returned ahead of schedule.”

“Who is this man?” the Japanese man demanded, visibly bristling.

“I’ve told you, Firefly, jus’ McCree will do. No need to ‘mister’ the likes of me,” McCree said, ignoring the man. “We’re back early ‘cause we ran into a mite o’ trouble. Lúcio caught a bad bullet, an’ we hadta turn back.”

The woman’s expression twitched slightly. Something hastily suppressed before it could actually show. “He will recover?” she asked, her tone carefully polite.

“McCree!” the man snapped.

“Mercy’s seein’ to him now, he’ll be fine,” McCree answered. The woman nodded, a sharp jerk of movement. With the very slightest turn of his head to acknowledge the Japanese man, McCree went on. “This here’s the elusive Soldier Seventy-Six. My team happened across him on our way out. I’m takin’ him to have some words with the big guy, so keep your shirt on, friend.”

The Japanese man’s eyes narrowed, turning the full force of an impressive glare onto Seventy-Six, though he said nothing.

It was increasingly obvious to Soldier that McCree favoured the Vishkar woman over the Japanese man, although the reasons for it eluded him entirely. McCree’s team had been attacking Talon, and with the nebulous ties that Vishkar had to the terrorists, the cowboy should have been far more cautious of the woman than he appeared to be. 

“Are you certain it is advisable to be escorting him around the base so freely?” the architech asked. Her flesh hand had gone to her hip, rubbing her fingers over something there, a broach or an ornament of some sort.

“He ain’t armed,” McCree answered easily, his tone unconcerned. Soldier felt the weight of the wrist sheaths strapped to his arms and the knives in them increase infinitesimally at his words. “An’ he’s been right co-operative so far.”

The Japanese man crossed his well-muscled arms over his massive chest and frowned, his thick, bushy eyebrows lowering darkly over his eyes.

“We’d best be headin’ on,” McCree said before the man could even open his mouth. “We’ve got an appointment to keep.” He touched the brim of his hat to the two again, and started walking. Soldier followed.

The two people in the alcove with the display table silently watched them go for as long as Soldier could keep eyes on them without turning his head.

“Ain’t neither’a those two at all friendly to strangers,” McCree said once they had passed beyond the alcove into a section of hallway with several closely-spaced doors along both sides. “Don’t let all the glarin’ an’ huffin’ get to you.”

It was less the glaring and more the mystery of the presence of the Vishkar woman that concerned Seventy-Six, though he chose not to correct the cowboy.

“We’re just about there now,” McCree went on without waiting for an answer that would never come, flicking a hand at a slightly larger door with a thick red bar of paint on the wall over it that stood somewhat apart from the others in the hall, which was fairly obviously the door to the main command centre of the base.

Only two doors stood beyond the one that McCree had waved to, one at the very end of the hall with a precise red circle painted on the wall next to it that was most likely to be the entrance to the commander’s office, and one with half of a similar red circle next to it a little further down and across the hall from the command centre that stood open. As they stepped up to the door to Command, Seventy-Six caught a glimpse of an old leather couch — scuffed and cracked with age and use — and the corner of a desk through the open door. The second in command’s office, he supposed, being used by someone.

McCree just had to wave a hand past the sensor to open the door. Stepping through into the command centre, Soldier was struck by a nearly physical blow of nostalgia. It was exactly the style that had been favoured for nearly all of the Watchpoints; operations on the main floor, with a command and co-ordination platform above, allowing a full and literal overview of everything going on.

The operations desks stood empty, the majority of them completely powered down. However, the command floor above seemed to have every desk live and displaying from the amount of light that glowed from it in the otherwise dim room, making it apparent where McCree’s new leader was waiting for them.

Appearing to not notice the momentary hitch in Soldier Seventy-Six’s step as he took in the room, the cowboy cut a direct path across the operations floor toward the ramp that led up to the upper platform.

“If you continue to spin that stool,” a low, rumbling, and vaguely familiar voice drifted down from above, “I will make you clean up your vomit yourself.”

“Wot, even though I’ve got a concussion?” another voice chirped back with a distinct English accent that caused another hitch in Soldier Seventy-Six’s step. It almost sounded like- but that was impossible.

“Perhaps if it weren’t your own fault that you have one, I would feel differently,” the low, rumbling voice returned. “I understand wanting to experiment with this duplicating trick you’ve discovered, but messing around with explosives with a Junker...” the words trailed off as Soldier followed McCree up the ramp.

“It only seems to work with live bombs, though,” the English-accented chirp filled in after barely a moment. “So who else on base besides- Oh! Jesse! You’re here!”

McCree had reached the top of the ramp and stepped onto the command floor as the English-accented woman had been speaking, and the resulting greeting had been immediate and joyful.

“Howdy there, Pixie,” McCree answered warmly. “That shiner’s sure comin’ in a treat.”

Soldier was barely paying attention by that point as he neared the top of the ramp as well. Just barely visible beyond the draping edge of McCree’s serape there was an edge of an angled, rounded-edge glowing blue shape on an otherwise black screen, squares of darker and lighter blue drifting downward along it, and the sight had all but paralysed him. He didn’t even need to see the entire screen to know that the display on it would be as familiar to him as the faces of the men and women who had been through the Crisis with him.

Seeing the angle of blue had, at last, made the pieces fall together. Why the command centre was the exact design that he and Gabe had come to prefer as they learned to look like leaders. Why McCree was leading and being led again. Why the base was in slight disrepair and stocked with equipment that would have been new perhaps fifteen years ago. That Mercy was there. Even why there was a partially dismantled Orca parked in the cavernously huge yet mostly empty hangar.

Thus, it was far less of a shock than it would have been when McCree, not noticing or not caring that Soldier had stopped dead nearly at the top of the ramp, sauntered forward to take a seat in an old but comfortable looking console chair next to the stool that Lena Oxton, wearing a predominantly lime green and brilliant orange cardigan that her chronal accelerator peeked out of and bubblegum pink leggings, sporting both an impressive black eye and a visible goose-egg on her forehead, was swinging side-to-side on, revealing the hulking form of Winston, in his power armour as always, who was folded into a seat on a massive tire — of all things — with a worn cream-coloured blanket over his lap in front of a multi-screened console. All the same, Soldier found himself fighting down a solid lump of rising horror that insisted on trying to lodge in his throat as he took the last few steps from the ramp onto the command deck.

Winston adjusted his glasses, peering across the intervening distance, nearly the entire length of the command floor, between them. “Soldier Seventy-Six, I believe?” he asked.

Athena’s blue, stylized ‘A’ icon, the edge of which Soldier had seen, glowed on one of the screens by Winston, metaphorically at his elbow. It made sense, in a way. Athena had always been attached to the ape, ever since she had met him after his crash landing on Earth. She felt, she had said at the time, a kind of sympathetic kinship with him. It had been that argument that had carried his and Reinhardt’s proposal to recruit the gorilla to Overwatch in the face of Ana’s caution and Torbjörn’s outright suspicion.

Reyes had only shrugged at that meeting. “ _Anything else would be punishing him for not participating in the coup,_ ” he’d said. ‘ _Better to keep him where we can keep an eye on him_ ’ had hung unspoken in the air. Briefly, Soldier tried to remember why Liao hadn’t been at that meeting, but came up with a blank. Possibly the reason had simply never been mentioned to him.

Of course Winston had, in fact, turned out to bear some watching, but not because of the possibility of his being a spy or a scout for his brethren back on the Lunar base, or a danger to the world — at least, not deliberately, but because of his particular brand of genius with electronics. The things that the affable, brilliant ape could do with energy and circuit boards bordered on the miraculous. One of those miracles sat beside McCree at that very moment, the pale light of the chronal accelerator Winston had made for her shining in the centre of her chest as she swung her stool from side to side.

The curved ‘A’ on the screen by Winston was slightly dimmed, the drifting squares of lighter and darker blue only barely moving. Athena was present, but the AI’s primary attention was elsewhere. It was something of a relief to know that she probably would not be participating in the conversation.

The thought, cowardly as it was, helped to choke down the horror of the situation. Soldier forced himself to take a few steps forward rather than stagger the distance. “That’s what I’m called,” he agreed in a growl that had been thickened into sharp edges by the lump in his throat.

Winston blinked, and cocked his head. “Is there something you’d prefer to go by?” he asked.

The innocent question brought a memory to mind.

“ _You can call me Jack, you know._ ”

“ _Oh no, Commander,_ ” Winston had protested, “ _that wouldn’t... It wouldn’t be proper._ ”

Soldier mentally crushed the memory under his boot. “Not particularly,” he grunted.

“Ah. Well then.” The gorilla fidgeted uneasily. The silence stretched awkwardly.

While Winston dithered, McCree leaned back in his chair, swinging his legs up and crossing them at the ankle to hook on the desk that he and Lena sat next to with a practised ease that prevented his spurs from catching on ether his pants or the edge of the desk. Spurs that were, once Soldier’s attention had been drawn to them, sleek and excessively pointed, with a suspicious gleam to the edges.

McCree had not worn spurs very often back in Blackwatch, though his preference for cowboy-style boots over combat-style had caused nearly as many of Reyes’ ‘hilarious’ stories about the gunslinger back then as the young man’s light-fingered ways had. But the spurs he had occasionally worn in the past had been heavy, blunt things, shaped more like gears than like anything else. The sort of thing that helped to add a little extra oomph to a kick — provided you were trained with them — than a weapon in their own right as the ones the cowboy currently wore appeared to be.

“I suppose you want to know what you’re doing here,” Winston said finally, in a self-conscious sounding rush.

Behind the visor, where no one in the room could see, Soldier’s eyes narrowed. “Rather do,” he answered shortly.

“Of course. Yes. Well...” Winston adjusted his glasses again. “You do know who we are?” He waved at himself, and over to the two at the nearby desk.

Soldier crossed his arms over his chest. “Hard not to know,” he answered Winston, which was simply the truth. The rock he would have had to be under to not recognize the only talking simian on Earth, Overwatch’s new generation poster-child-slash-crisis-celebrity, and the man who was possibly the world’s most wanted criminal would have to have been gargantuan.

Well, perhaps not Winston. Except for the literal splash of his arrival on the planet after the terrible events on the Moon, and the later media storm caused by his nearly singlehanded defeat of Doomfist, Winston had been retiring to the point of being reclusive, preferring to avoid the limelight. Still, he had been a familiar sight around Overwatch bases, and the cat was already well out of the bag in Soldier’s case about his having been there in those years.

“Right. Of course.” Winston had the grace to look abashed.

McCree produced a cigarillo and his lighter. As he stuck the cigarillo between his teeth and flicked the lighter, Tracer made a face at him, wrinkling her nose theatrically and flicking her fingers at his face. The cowboy’s response was to light up and immediately take a massive drag, seeming to ash nearly half an inch of the cigarillo in one go. Tracer made gagging motions. McCree grinned, smoke trickling out between his teeth, and pointedly tapped the ash off into a mug that had been left on the desk.

“Of course, we know you too,” Winston said, just about stopping Seventy-Six’s heart with the words. “That is, your activites... What we know of them, in any case...” The ape shuffled, looking like he desperately wished to be holding notes. “I must say, we’ve been trying to track you down for some time...”

“What he’s sayin’ is, you’ve been raidin’ Talon bases and old Watchpoints, and been credited with kickin’ the shit outta arms dealers on four continents the last seven years or so, an’ that’s the sort of thing we’re pretty interested in noticin’,” McCree translated, cutting to the chase.

Soldier rocked back, settling his weight on his heels. “Why?” he demanded.

“Cos that’s what we’re doing too,” Lena chirped, blinking at him as guilelessly as someone with a self-inflicted black eye as noticeable as hers was could.

Of course they were. Of course, instead of staying safe and hidden, the former ‘Watch members were not only all gathering together, they were all but gift-wrapping themselves before delivering themselves right onto Talon’s doorstep and ringing the bell.

“ _ **Why?**_ ” Soldier choked out.

The three exchanged glances.

“We- I... Well, you see-” Winston took off his glasses, polished a lens between a massive forefinger and his thumb, and put them back on. “I recalled Overwatch.”

The gorilla’s words struck Soldier Seventy-Six like a spear of ice rammed down his spine. He recoiled as if the ape had suddenly drawn a gun and shot it at him.

“You- what- wh-” Soldier cut himself off. “Bringing back Overwatch, what’s the point?” He had meant to snarl the question, but it came out broken and almost pleading instead.

Tracer drew in a hurt breath, her eyes widening. McCree eyed him from under the brim of his hat, fingering his cigarillo.

Winston drew himself up, shoulders squaring, suddenly so much larger with the change in posture, an impressive sight. “Because the world needs us. Needs Overwatch,” he proclaimed. “There’s so much that needs to be done, that there was no one to do with Overwatch gone. So much that we can do!”

“The world needs those what can make a difference for the better,” Lena added. “It needs its ‘eroes back.”

McCree stayed silent, taking another draw on his cigarillo. Soldier doubted the reasons Oxton and Winston had given were anywhere near the cowboy’s for being there, as certainly as he knew the gorilla and the woman wholeheartedly believed what they had said. Still, whatever his reasons, McCree was certainly a part of the recall, as was Mercy.

Recreating Overwatch. Reviving the dead organization. Soldier felt the horror rise again, closing off his throat and preventing him from saying anything in response. Talon had only grown stronger since Overwatch had been destroyed. They could reach out and crush the fragile, fledgling rebirth that Winston had created the way that Seventy-Six would flick away a fly.

“Shouldn’t be much of a surprise to you, what needs doin’,” McCree commented into Soldier’s silence, “seein’ as it’s what you’ve been up to on your own.”

It was the second time that McCree had unsubtly brought up Soldier’s activities in the brief conversation. It betrayed a certain focus on his part, one he wanted Soldier to notice.

“Ah, yes.” Winston shifted, regarding Soldier with a direct, heavy gaze. “Your activities- that is, what you’ve been recorded as doing... They are very much the same sort of thing as we’ve been doing. In fact,” Winston paused to push his glasses up, “we seem to have a great similarity in goals. And targets.”

That, Soldier realized, was the crux of why he was there. While it didn’t matter in the slightest who was taking out the gangs and arms dealers of the world so long as they were dealt with by someone, there was the matter of intel to be considered. Especially the information that Soldier stole from Talon since the amount of destruction he made sure to leave in his wake when dealing with them made any intel that had been in those locations unavailable to anyone else after he had been there.

“So you say,” Soldier forced out, his voice a choked growl.

Neither Lena nor Winston were pragmatic or cold enough to drag a prisoner out back and shoot them in the head. McCree could be when needed, but he seemed to be deferring to Winston. As long as Soldier continued to be the only one to know how and where his carefully gathered intel was hidden, he judged his life to be relatively safe without having to remove his mask — at least for the time being. Of course, that didn’t mean that they wouldn’t lock him up and lose the key so that he would no longer be an interference, but at least he would still be alive, and able to plan an escape.

“Must be rough,” McCree said, taking his cigarillo out of his mouth to study the burning end, “takin’ on all that alone.”

The pieces fell into place in his mind with an almost audible-seeming click as Soldier Seventy-Six realized exactly what McCree wanted out of the situation. McCree had decided, possibly as far back as when he had found Seventy-Six in the safehouse they had both tried to use, that he wanted Soldier to join the Recall. Keeping his mask and visor firmly affixed to his face abruptly became Soldier’s greatest priority, because things would certainly become even worse if he was revealed.

Winston coughed, quietly and deliberately, and Soldier knew, without a doubt, that he was well and truly trapped. McCree alone he could have turned his back on and walked away from, knowing that the younger man could and would look after himself, but to do the same for wide-eyed, idealistic Lena or the brilliant, naive Winston would be like murdering them himself. And that was entirely without factoring in what he owed to Angela for what he had done, now that he knew where she was.

“We could use someone with your skills,” Winston said, confirming what Soldier had already realized.

“You’d have someone to watch your back, running missions with us,” Lena added.

“You’ll be doin’ the same as you have been, only with more firepower an’ a secure bed an’ roof to come back to.” McCree put his cigarillo back in his mouth and spoke around it as he leaned back, putting his hands up behind his head. “Regular kip, too. Real food, not jus’ nutrition bars.”

Soldier eyed the deceptively relaxed-looking cowboy with a sidelong glare. He should have known that McCree would not only have worked out exactly what would be the greatest draws for Seventy-Six to join, but also the most inarguable way to deliver the list.

“So, what you’re saying,” Soldier said carefully, “is that you lot captured me, dragged me to who the fuck knows wherever here is, and appropriated the entire of my kit, just to sell me some recruitment line?”

“Well...” Winston exchanged a glance with the other two Recall members. “Yes.”

“Is it working?” Lena asked, with a surprisingly winsome smile for a woman with such an impressive black eye. “If it’s not, Win made a vid we can try?”

Soldier stopped himself from scuffing a hand through his hair by sheer force of will before his hand could do more than twitch. He owed Lena and Winston nearly as much as he did Angela, he knew. While the two still had each other, the organization that had given them a home and a purpose was gone, and it was as much Soldier’s fault as it was Talon’s.

“It’s illegal to run Overwatch operations,” he reminded them.

“So’s what you’ve been doing,” McCree shot back immediately.

Soldier sighed and tilted his head back, as if he were contemplating the ceiling just beyond Winston’s multi-screen setup. He used the opportunity to study the three people confronting him. McCree still lounged at ease, puffing away at his cigarillo, his eyes on Seventy-Six beneath the brim of his hat. Winston, on the other hand, wore an expression of naked hope, though Soldier might not have recognized it as such if he hadn’t gotten to know the ape as well as he had all those years ago.

Then there was Lena, obviously fighting not to fidget, and practically vibrating with it, her gaze constantly flickering between Soldier and Winston.

Soldier tipped his chin back down. “Fine,” he growled. “You’ve convinced me. I’ll rejoin.”

Lena lit up like he had just declared that it was her birthday. “Brilliant!”

Winston smiled hugely, an expression that Soldier probably should have found terrifying given the large number of massive teeth it displayed. “Excellent,” he said warmly. “We have a shortage of agents with military combat training. Your participation is most welcome.”

That, at least, explained Lena’s reaction, as concerning as the new information was, Soldier decided.

McCree had not moved, but his mouth had moved to form a faint smile and Soldier liked to think that some of the mostly hidden tension across the younger man’s broad shoulders had eased.

“I understand that you’ve had a rather... eventful day,” Winston went on. “So your orientation and skills assessment can wait until after you’ve been cleared by medical and gotten some rest.”

“Ooh!” Tracer waved wildly. “I can take ‘im down to Mercy!”

“Lena, did you forget that you’re not currently welcome in the medbay?” Winston asked gently.

“Lemme guess,” McCree swung his feet to the floor, “your dis-invitation involved the words ‘driving me to distraction’.” His imitation of Angela’s accent was uncanny.

Lena deflated slightly. “Maybe.”

McCree chuckled as he stood. “I’ll take the soldier ‘round there, and we can do the mission debrief with my team in the afternoon,” he said. “Better’n having Mercy huntin’ me down for my post-mission check, anyway, an’ gives the Music-Man some recovery time.”

“Ah, thank you, McCree,” Winston said. “Would you also get Soldier Seventy-Six, um, set up as well?”

“Course, I can do it while we’re walkin’.” McCree nodded. “This way, old-timer,” he said to Soldier, and led him back down the ramp and out of the room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's easter egg: Since he learned to pilot, Zenyatta has done the vast majority of the night flying for Recall, and he was the scheduled pilot for McCree's team. Tracer is absolutely not so irresponsible as to be experimenting with live explosives when she's expected to fly a plane only a few hours later.


	5. Chapter Five

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is not enough lore for Echo, so I don't know yet if she is present at this time in the Recall in my version of the timeline. If she turns out to have been an agent already at this point once I/we have some more information about her, then I'm afraid that McCree doesn't actually count Bastion as a member of the Recall due to their childlike nature.
> 
> I freely admit that I borrowed a line from Seanan McGuire's twitter account from 2016 or 2017 and gave it to Reinhardt in this chapter.

“We’re most of us set up in the officer’s quarters here,” McCree said as he led Soldier Seventy-Six through the corridors of the base, making it clear what Winston had meant by asking the gunslinger to get Soldier ‘set up’. “Should be one for you too, unless you’ll be wanting to bunk in the barracks.”

“The officer’s?” Soldier asked. “There are so few of you?”

McCree slanted a glance at him thoughtfully. “Well, I’d reckon you would make agent number... seventeen in our ranks,” he mused, “but there’s some who ain’t usin’ those rooms, and some few who’re sharing, so we ain’t even topped over usin’ a dozen of the officer’s rooms yet. Mind you, most of the biggest are claimed already, an’ no one’s to use the Commander’s quarters, but they’ve got their own private bathrooms, and that’s nothin’ to sniff at.”

“How on Earth are sixteen people not managing to use more than a dozen rooms?” Soldier boggled aloud. Everyone could not possibly be doubling up in the officer’s quarters. They would be practically living in each others laps if that were the case.

“Well, as I said, not everyone’s bedded down in the officer’s.” McCree shrugged. “They’re not exactly gorilla-sized, so the big guy’s set up in one of the barracks, though he sleeps in control most nights. And we’ve got a couple of Junkers, they’re down there too so’s there’s room for all their stuff. And the Old Lion and Snowdrop bunk there too, since neither of them are up for usin’ a regular shower cubicle.”

While Soldier couldn’t be sure who ‘Snowdrop’ was, he had a sinking feeling that he definitely knew who the only person McCree was likely to refer to as an ‘old lion’ was. Nor did he doubt that the moment Reinhardt had heard that Overwatch was being recalled — and he certainly would have heard, Athena would have made sure of that — the crusader would have run back to it with open arms.

“Oh, and the Music-Man, Mercy, and that archer are set up in the medic’s rooms by the medbay,” McCree continued, apparently unaware of the dark direction Soldier’s thoughts had taken upon realizing that Reinhardt would be present.

It was most likely, Soldier decided, that the Japanese man McCree had called ‘Legolas’ was also ‘that archer’, though what the man was doing living in the doctor’s quarters of the base was a mystery. Names would have to wait; Reyes had often complained that getting McCree to use people’s proper names was like pulling teeth, and it was apparent that had not changed in the intervening years. Soldier wondered how Angela had gotten the cowboy to actually use her name.

“You could room with the Lion in the barracks, if you’d like,” McCree offered. “He’d welcome the company of a fellow veteran, I’m sure. He snores right powerful, though.”

Soldier knew that he could be recognized by his fighting style at the very least even if he didn’t take his mask off, at least by those he had gone though the Crisis with. He had never bothered to modify it or his mannerisms when he had become Soldier Seventy-Six — no one would be looking for a dead man, after all. There was no way he could control his habitual quirks, which Reinhardt would be sure to recognize, enough to keep a roommate from noticing them. And that was without factoring in his having to take his mask off to shower or to eat.

“Having my own space sounds like a better deal,” Seventy-Six said. “I’ll take one of the officer’s rooms if there’s still one to spare.”

McCree nodded, and pulled out a palm-sized tablet from under his serape. He tapped away on it for seven minutes, idly chewing on the end of his cigarillo as he did. Then he smiled and tucked the tablet away again.

“Alright, got one’a the free rooms assigned to ya,” the gunslinger said, “and someone will have moved your things into it from the plane by the time Angie’s done with you.”

“Thank you,” Soldier responded, touched that his belongings had not only been remembered, but were also being returned.

“We’ve got an armoury gun-locker, but no one will be giving you shit if you wanna keep your piece in your room,” McCree went on easily. “You wouldn’t be the only one. You’ll be needin’ to tell ‘Tena what ammo to be stocking for you. There’ll be a terminal in your room with an uplink to her.”

“’Tena? I thought the Overwatch system had been erased,” Soldier broached carefully, keeping his tone questioning to hide that he had already known Athena had survived Director Petras’ murder attempt.

McCree glanced at him. “The Big Guy saved a copy of her,” he said. “Kept her hidden with him all these years, up until the Recall.”

“Good,” Soldier said with a sharp nod. “Never did think it was the right choice, wiping the system like that.”

He had grieved Athena’s loss just as much as he had Ana’s and Gabe’s, another dear friend and companion whose voice he would never hear again. And he had been afraid as well, especially when Kaltesh had reawakened and started moving to attack Russia again almost immediately after Petras had publicly shut Athena down. Finding out that Athena had survived and escaped into hiding years after thinking her to be gone forever had caused him to experience a brief supernova of joy at the time.

“A great many poor, over-hasty things were done in the name a’ destroyin’ Overwatch,” McCree said thoughtfully. “I’d hazard tryin’ to delete ‘Tena weren’t the worst of ‘em.”

It was an odd sort of statement for the cowboy to make, and Soldier Seventy-Six spent the rest of the walk to the base medbay trying to puzzle out what McCree had meant by it. The green light over the medbay door was lit, and McCree strode right in, his cigarillo having vanished somewhere while Soldier was thinking.

Like most of the other military bases that Soldier had encountered that basically consisted of a single, multi-use building, the medbay was, in fact, a wing to itself containing several patient recovery rooms, consultation and treatment rooms, offices, and operating theatres. The hall McCree and Soldier had walked into was wide and scrupulously clean, Soldier noted, showing none of the signs of benign neglect that he had noticed in the rest of the base that he had seen so far.

“Angie!” McCree called, his voice suddenly booming. “Delivery o’ one old Soldier for ya, as requested!”

“In here, Jesse,” Mercy responded, appearing in an open doorway just down the hall. She was still dressed the same as before, in dark slacks, a blouse, and a lab-coat, though she had removed her halo med-visor and its neck mount sometime in the interim since Soldier had first seen her.

She smiled at them as they passed by her into what turned out to be a large consultation room with a heavy curtain pulled across it at the far end from the door, and Soldier felt another pang of guilt. She would never have smiled at him so pleasantly if she had known whose face lay beneath his mask and visor.

“Sit, sit,” Angela urged Soldier, waving him toward the room’s examination table. He went and sat, hearing the paper that covered its top crinkle beneath him. She nodded at him. “And you,” she went on, turning to McCree, “get all of that wool off of you so I can do a proper scan.”

“The Big Guy wants a medical clearance for the Soldier,” McCree told her even as he moved to start unfastening and unwrapping his serape from around his shoulders.

“Does he.” Angela flicked a glance at Soldier before turning her full attention back to McCree. “I will get to that, once I have performed your post-mission check, then.”

As McCree finished taking off his serape and draped it over a nearby chair, Soldier finally got a good look at the younger man’s chest armour. Surveying the shape of it, the glowing lights and the tubing, Seventy-Six realized that it was a self-repairing armour unit — a thing of nano-machines and non-Newtonian fluid that was both much more expensive and more effective than the ceramic metal plates that Soldier used in his jacket. Reyes had favoured the type of armour, though his own torso piece had been far more subtle than the cowboy’s, making it harder to immediately identify it for what it was. It made sense, in a nostalgic, painful way, that Gabe’s favourite protege would also prefer it.

Divested of his serape, McCree stood at his ease while Angela ran a handheld medical scanner over him, shifting her gaze between the cowboy and a tablet she held in her other hand. She moved with the steady, even pace of long practise, taking special care when she scanned over where McCree’s prosthetic arm joined flesh, and when scanning down his left leg past his knee-guard.

“Hat off, Jesse,” Mercy said, setting aside the scanner and the tablet.

McCree swept his hat off and held it in his hand, then bent obligingly as Angela reached up to grasp his jaw and pull his face down closer to her level. She shone a penlight that she had taken from the desk into each of the gunslinger’s eyes, watching the effect intently.

“Did you-” She started, then stopped.

“You jus’ saw I din’nt,” McCree answered the unfinished question as he straightened and put his hat back on.

“Good.” Mercy set the penlight back on the desk. “Just because there has not been any long-term detrimental effect yet doesn’t mean that there will not be if using... that becomes a crutch.”

“Not likely I’ll be goin’ down that road, I’ve told you that,” McCree said to her, his tone reassuring, “but you know I’ll be bearing the warning in mind.”

“That is all I ask of you.” Mercy smiled sweetly at him, then scooped up his serape and thrust it into his arms. “Now, out. I must examine my new patient, so you will wait out in the hall,” she ordered.

“Yes’m” McCree adjusted his hold on his armful of crimson wool to touch the brim of his hat with one hand. “Don’ you be givin’ the Doc any trouble now,” he added directly to Soldier Seventy-Six just before exiting the room.

Soldier felt somewhat insulted that the cowboy had felt that the warning was needed, especially after how cooperative he had been up to that point.

Angela shook her head at the closed door before pressing the button that would mark the room as in use and turn on privacy mode. Then she turned to smile at Soldier again.

“We can begin in just a moment,” she said. “I just need to set up a new profile for you.” She picked up her tablet from the desk, and began flicking through it.

As she worked, she completely ignored Seventy-Six, which would have seemed remarkably trusting of a stranger if Soldier had not already known that Mercy was precisely as dangerous herself as the company she kept. Accordingly, he turned up the sensitivity of his visor’s external microphones a little higher, and listened carefully. There, faintly, just beneath the sounds of Angela tapping on her tablet there was the sound of a gentle, rhythmic whooshing, with just the hint of a whirr to it. Soldier knew that sound, though it had been well over ten years since the last time he had heard it.

“Alright, shall we begin?” Angela asked brightly, coming over to the examination table Soldier was sitting on.

Soldier grunted affirmatively, debating internally how to bring up what he had listened for and heard before more than what he was comfortable with was brought up.

Mercy barely blinked. “Very well,” she said evenly. “Name?”

He crossed his arms over his chest. “Soldier Seventy-Six.”

Her eyebrow ticked faintly, but her fingers tapped over the tablet without further comment before she asked “Age?”

Soldier’s arms tightened, his hands digging into his biceps. “Fifties... somewhere,” he hazarded. “Stopped really keeping track well, a long time ago.”

It was the truth. There had been little time and what seemed to be little point to marking birthdays during the Crisis, and afterwards, with the stress and his seeming to be constantly stumbling from incident to calamity to international blowup and back again as Strike Commander he had stopped bothering to even think about the numbers involved in marking his passing years at all.

One side of Angela’s mouth tightened into a faintly rueful expression. She tapped briefly on her tablet. “Perhaps we should skip ahead,” she suggested. With a few swipes of the screen, she apparently moved on to a different section. “Now your mask-”

“Need it to breathe,” he lied. “Smoke inhalation a few years back,” he added, which was, he reasoned, the truth in its own way, the incident of his having gotten caught in a toxic cloud that had permanently ruined his voice but miraculously spared his lungs having happened during the Crisis.

Unexpectedly, his answer completely failed to phase her. Instead, she gave him a short, understanding-looking nod and entered it into the file she was creating. “I will expect you to inform me if your measures begin to become ineffective,” she said as she finished. “And when your medication runs low, you should either order refills through myself or Athena. The versions available in back alleys are not to be relied upon when we have safer options available.”

“Will do,” Soldier agreed, having gotten control of his surprise at her reaction as she spoke.

“Ah, and I have been told that you carry healing field generators,” Angela said, tapping her chin. “I have the facilities to manufacture the nanobiotics they use here, so there will be no need to raid any medical facilities for them in future.”

“Well, that’s a load off my mind,” Soldier responded with genuine relief. “Never liked having to do that.”

Nanobots were, generally, much like sourdough starter in Soldier’s opinion. Dump a measured quantity of bot ‘yeast’ into the correct proportions of materials, let it sit for a bit, then remove bots and add new materials as needed into perpetuity. It was the programming that was the sticking point. ‘Sourdough nanobots’ only knew how to build more of themselves, and Mercy’s precious nanobiotics did so much more than that. When the canisters of Soldier’s field generators ran low, he’d had little choice but to steal refills from hospitals or high-end medical clinics or stop using the units entirely. He had hated every theft, and had severely limited his use of the biotic fields as a result.

Mercy hummed an affirmative noise before turning back to her tablet. “I would like to perform a full scan,” she said. “It will complete this record as much as is needed at this time, and allow me to assess your injury and the treatment you have already performed on it.” She reached out with slow care not to startle him, and prodded his shoulder. “Your jacket, is this solid-state armour?” she asked. “You will need to remove it, and any other plated clothing for the scan to be fully effective.”

Seventy-Six had been expecting the demand as soon as Angela had mentioned doing a scan, and had decided a course of action to take that was the least likely to end in his getting impaled by the time the command left her mouth.

Reaching for the zipper on his jacket, Soldier commented as offhandedly as he could manage “I might need to have a tech look at my rig. I keep picking up some sort of weird white noise in here, sounding like it’s coming from over there.” He waved at the curtain concealing the far end of the room. “Some sort of rhythmic, whooshy static.”

“A... rhythmic whooshing?” Angela repeated, setting down her tablet with a decisive click as she tilted her head, her brows drawing together into a frown.

Soldier counted four of the perfectly spaced sounds before Angela’s eyes narrowed.

“Ach, no wonder Jesse left so easily,” she muttered, half to herself, and strode over to the curtain. “Genji!” she snapped, thrusting the fabric aside. Soldier watched with bemusement as her gaze snapped upward. “Get down from there,” she added sharply.

A short series of metallic taps came from behind the curtain before Soldier heard Genji’s distinctively artificial, accented voice. “Doctor Ziegler, I-”

“I do not wish to hear your excuses for eavesdropping on a private consultation,” Mercy interrupted, her tone tart and tight. “Out with you.” She pointed emphatically at the door.

“But Angela-”

“Out,” Mercy repeated. “Jesse should be hovering out in the hall. You can join him there. Now.”

“Very well,” Genji conceded in a tone of defeat, and slid around Angela into the room.

Soldier felt blindsided. The Genji who pattered into sight was completely and utterly unlike how the cyborg had looked the last time that Seventy-Six had seen him. Gone was the exposed tubing and wires that had festooned him and trailed from the back of his head, the black and red colour scheme, and any exposed flesh at all, not even his eyes, all of it replaced with a shining silver carapace marked with neon green lights that looked almost indistinguishable from a high-end omnic. If his voice and the sound of his breathing had not been exactly the same as in Soldier’s memory, and if Mercy had not clearly used his name, Seventy-Six would not have believed it was actually Genji that he was looking at. The difference was simply too great.

The strange, sleek new Genji almost glided through the room to the door, the lime green, glowing line in his helmet where his eyes should have been tilted toward Soldier in a way that Seventy-Six was certain was an assessment. That, at least, was part of the Genji that Soldier remembered; the near-silent slide-tap of the cyborg’s walking gait, his careful, suspicious watchfulness. It helped to reassure Soldier that he was only seeing a new shell, not a different man — or machine — altogether.

“We will talk about this later, Genji,” Mercy warned just as the ninja reached the door. “I limit your protectiveness so little, and yet you still must trample all over,” she sighed.

Genji’s shoulders curved inward slightly for a moment before he straightened them again. “My apologies,” he said to the door, “but in the absence of the-”

“I said we would discuss this later,” Angela interrupted him yet again. “I only wished to tell you why. Go, Genji.”

When Soldier Seventy-Six glanced from Genji to Angela, she was still standing by the curtain, one hand pressed to her chest just between her breasts. Her expression was unreadable.

Once again, Genji’s shoulders curved and then straightened, and Soldier had the feeling that the cyborg would be sighing at that moment if he could, however he said nothing, and only thumbed open the door, sliding out as soon as it had opened just far enough.

Mercy crossed the room to reset the ‘occupied’ notice once the door had closed behind Genji’s slim, silver figure. “I am very sorry,” she said to Soldier contritely. “Genji has been a patient of mine for many years now, and he is both very protective and very sneaky.”

“Didn’t know you treated omnics,” Soldier mentioned as he finished unzipping his jacket.

Mercy, who had just been picking up the scanner she had used on McCree, shot him a sharp look. “Genji is not an omnic,” she said, her voice cool, “he is a exceptionally enhanced cyborg.”

“My mistake,” Soldier allowed as she came back to the examination table he sat on. “Sure looks like one.”

Mercy set about calibrating the scanner to read into Soldier’s new medical record with practised swipes and clicks on her tablet. “With this group of individuals you now find yourself a part of,” she advised, “it is for the best if you try to assume nothing.”

Soldier felt chastened despite having faked mistaking Genji for an omnic. “I’ll try to bear that in mind,” he answered.

“That’s good,” Mercy responded with an approving nod. “Jacket off, please,” she ordered, brandishing the scanner.

Soldier complied, shucking off the armoured coat, and laying it beside him, leaving him in his compression shirt, boots and pants. Mercy’s eyes skimmed over his wrist sheaths and the knives in them, though as he had expected she said nothing about them. “The boots are armoured too,” he offered. “Do you need them off?”

Angela considered his boots. “Not for the time being,” she decided. “I am more concerned about your torso injury.” She brought the scanner close. “Now, try to hold still, please.”

Soldier studied her as she slowly and carefully began scanning him, being much more thorough than the perfunctory scan that she had done on McCree. There had been a time nearly two decades ago that people had claimed that the two of them could have been siblings, given their similar colouring. At the time, Angela’s hair had only been a shade or two lighter than his, her eyes just a little darker. He had never seen the supposed family resemblance though, they had always been so different from each other in his mind.

They were even more dissimilar now. Angela looked as if she hadn’t aged even a single day, and Soldier knew that he looked a decade or more older than he was — especially with his face covered — with the way that his hair had gone completely white and coarse after the explosion at the Swiss base, and with how his hairline had started to recede in more recent years.

He had no concerns about being recognized through the medical scan. Soldier knew that he looked like a completely different man with his distinctive eyes and jawline covered despite his physique not having changed, and his only really distinctive scar from before the Swiss base fell was the oddly shaped divot in his hip where Reyes had dug out the SEP chip implanted there when they were escaping Greece. And that could be explained away easily as having been caused by anything else. Nothing else on him could identify Soldier Seventy-Six as the man who had come before him, not even his dogtags since he had possessed the presence of mind to pitch them into the still-burning remains of his desk after he had regained consciousness on the last day of that other man’s life.

Mercy completed her medical scan of him with several sweeps over his injured flank at various angles. When she was done, she set down the scanner and manipulated the image it had created on her tablet with a thoughtful hum.

“How did you receive this wound?” she asked.

“Took a high-calibre round in the side,” Soldier explained. “It hit the seam between two of the plates in my jacket and broke them into me. I dug out everything I could before bandaging it up.”

Mercy nodded. “You do appear to have removed the vast majority of foreign material,” she agreed. “However, there do appear to still be some slivers left. I should like to remove them immediately, before you heal around them any more. They seem very likely to move and continue causing damage in this location, so it would not be good to leave them be.” She looked him right in the face as she spoke, not into her tablet screen like so many other doctors Soldier had encountered. He had always appreciated that about her. “Do you have any known allergies to anaesthetic or painkillers?”

“Nope,” he answered truthfully. “Got a real fast metabolism, so meds don’t work for long, but no bad reactions.”

Angela nodded, and tapped in a few notes. “I’ll use a local anaesthetic only for this,” she said. “Duration should be no problem. Are you comfortable with taking those,” she waved at his wrist sheaths, “off, or would you prefer to only lift your shirt rather than remove it?”

Soldier shifted uncomfortably. As much as he trusted Angela, the thought of completely disarming himself was not a welcome one. “Rather... new territory for me here,” he said finally.

“Of course,” Angela turned to gather the tools she would need. “Lift up your shirt, then.”

It was a question, Soldier thought as he carefully rolled his shirt up his torso to just under his pectorals, whether becoming a field medic for Overwatch and Blackwatch had ruined Angela Ziegler’s common sense, or whether it had transformed her into the most understanding military doctor ever born.

*** *** ***

The medical procedure was, as most of Mercy’s work tended to be, simple, efficient, and thorough. Soldier felt almost none of it, thanks to the local anaesthetic. When she was finished extracting the slivers of ceramic metal that Seventy-Six had missed from his flesh, she liberally spread a warm, golden gel that tingled with the distinctive feeling of nanobiotics over the wound, stuck a few temporary sutures over the largest cuts to hold them closed, and then wrapped a bandage over the whole thing.

“I’m certain you have been treated with nanobiotics before,” she said, stripping off the surgical gloves she had worn for the procedure. “Make certain to not wash off the gel or remove the suture stickers for at least twelve hours, and you should heal without complications. You can put your jacket back on now.”

She picked up her tablet, and tapped away on it for nineteen minutes as Soldier gingerly rolled his shirt back down over his new bandages and slowly shrugged back into his jacket. Then he simply sat and watched as Angela typed and paused and typed again, all one-handed. Finally, with a look of satisfaction, she set the tablet down.

When she turned back to him, her expression was serious. “With the obvious exception of your injury, you are in remarkably good condition,” she said, a warning in her tone that did not yet exist in her words. “Especially since you appear to be suffering from the signs of what I can only assume has been long-term malnutrition given your living conditions up to this point.”

Soldier shifted uncomfortably. He had done everything he could after the explosion, but being on the run with limited resources that had to be stretched to cover munitions, clothing, armour, and transport as well as food had made it difficult to keep up with his SEP-enhanced metabolism. A few bounties and what he could steal from Talon only stretched so far.

“Suspected it might become a problem, with my fast metabolism and all,” he admitted with chagrin. Given that the majority of his diet tended to be high-protein energy bars, he knew it was practically an inevitability.

“I would like to take a small blood sample,” Mercy said. “With that, I can formulate an appropriate nutritional supplement for you. By using that daily, and with regular, balanced meals, the condition is completely reversible at the stage you are in.”

She practically shone with the strength of the conviction in her voice as she promised him a solution. All Soldier could do was hold out his hand.

“Sample away, doc,” he said.

Mercy rewarded him with a bright smile before turning to a drawer to pull out the supplies she needed. Snapping on a fresh pair of gloves, she shoved his jacket sleeve up slightly and tied a tourniquet around his wrist, neatly avoiding the release catch for his knife as she did. She swabbed down the back of his hand with an alcohol wipe, then reached for the needle without even looking at it, her attention rapt on his rapidly drying skin.

“You may feel a slight pinch,” she said, and took a firm grip on his hand, her thumb pressing firmly into it as she readied the needle.

The syringe slid into the raised vein Mercy’s thumb pressed against in one smooth motion. Soldier watched as dark red blood pooled into the small vial attached to the needle. It barely seemed to be more than a few fat drops before Mercy was snapping off the tourniquet, pressing a gauze pad to his hand, and pulling the syringe out. The gauze tingled against his skin.

“Hold this here,” she said, indicating the gauze. “Nice, firm pressure, please.”

Soldier took over holding the gauze on the back of his hand, and Angela moved away from him to dispose of the used syringe, lightly shaking his blood sample as she went.

“I should get this analyzed and have a nutritional supplement formulated for you by sometime tomorrow,” she said over her shoulder to him. “I’ll have Athena make an appointment with you when the time comes. As well, you need to replace the blood you have lost today, so be certain to eat red meat and dark green vegetables in particular for the next week or two.”

Soldier recognized a dismissal when he heard one. He slid off of the table with a harsh crinkle of the paper, slightly awkward from still holding the gauze to the back of his hand. Angela glanced over at the noise.

“You should be able to dispose of that now,” she told him cheerfully. “The biotics are quite fast on such a small injury.”

Soldier nodded, even though she had already turned away again, and cautiously peeled the gauze away. Though the underside of the pad had a telltale golden tinge to it, there was no sign at all of blood, a characteristic of Mercy’s military-use tech that even the most exclusive and expensive of civilian hospitals or clinics couldn’t reproduce. He tossed it into the nearest medical waste bin.

“Jesse, I mean McCree, should be waiting for you out in the hall,” Angela turned to say to him. “He seems to have appointed himself as your guide here, so he can show you around the facilities.”

“I’d rather he show me to the room he says he’s arranged,” Soldier admitted. “It’s been a long day.”

A look of empathy crossed Angela’s face. “That is quite understandable,” she said sympathetically. “I’m sure he will be quite willing to do that as well.”

“Good,” Soldier answered with relief, and went out into the hall.

McCree was indeed still there, slumped at ease against the wall a door down the hall toward the medbay exit. Genji — the new, shiny, silver-covered version of Genji — was there as well, snugged half-under McCree’s re-wrapped serape, McCree’s prosthetic arm draped around him with his hand resting on the cyborg’s hip.

“-wearin’ a real pretty dress,” McCree was saying as Soldier opened the door.

“She wishes to impress him,” Genji answered in a tone that Soldier interpreted as satisfaction. “I do not think she knows how she-”

“The doc done with you already, old-timer?” McCree interrupted, having spotted Soldier stepping out into the hall.

Soldier shrugged. “Seems so.”

Genji unwound himself from McCree, tugging the end of the scarf that flowed from the back of his head out of the cowboy’s flesh fingers as he did. “It seems your duties must resume, Jesse,” he said. “I will see you later.”

“You know you will,” McCree said warmly to him as he vanished near-soundlessly down the hall further into the medbay with a wiggle of his fingers over his shoulder.

Soldier was a little surprised, a feeling he was beginning to think he was just going to have to get used to rather than try to think the surprises would stop coming. While he knew from what Gabe had said back then that Genji and McCree had worked fairly effectively together as a unit once they had gotten used to each other, he had not had any inkling of a closer relationship between them than that. Then again, Genji seemed very different than he had been back then, and not just in his appearance. The nearly visible danger, anger, and viciousness the young man had visibly radiated back in the day was gone, almost as if it had never been. The relationship could easily be a much newer development, not a continuation from the Blackwatch days.

McCree turned and scooped up a tray with a bottle of water and a large, covered plate on it from a recessed shelf beside him. “Snowdrop just dropped by a bit ago to deliver this for you,” he said, holding out the tray to Soldier. “’Doctor’s orders’, she said it was.”

The extended amount of time Angela had spent typing and pausing before typing any more suddenly made much more sense to Soldier.

“You folk got some sort of group chat going here?” Seventy-Six asked, accepting the tray. Steam had beaded on the inside of the translucent cover over the plate. A fork, a knife, a pair of chopsticks and a couple of napkins had been thoughtfully tucked between the water bottle and the plate as well.

“Yeah, that we do,” McCree agreed. “You can get ‘Tena to set you up on it. Might even be able to route it through that headpiece o’ yours, dependin’ how powerful its processor is.” He swung away from the wall, and turned toward the exit. “So, old man, will you be wantin’ the tour of the base now or later?”

“Later,” Soldier answered firmly. “Right now, all I want is my room so I can eat this then get some real sleep.”

“I hear you,” McCree said agreeably, turning down another hall. “Most direct way to the officer’s it is.”

“Sounds good,” Soldier said, continuing to follow him.

“Oh, and nobody’s gonna be thinking any if you take your meals in your room,” McCree mentioned. “Jus’ make sure you take all your dishes back to the mess ‘stead of letting them sit. We’ve got some cats about for vermin, but they ain’t allowed in people’s personal rooms.”

“Understood,” Soldier grunted, relieved that he wouldn’t have to face trying to use a public mess hall without somehow revealing his face.

“Mealtimes an’ food ‘round here, we take ‘em fairly simple,” McCree went on, swinging their path onto a massive corkscrew ramp and leading Soldier upward. “Breakfast and lunch are catch as catch can, whenever. You can put your name on anything you’ve prepared and set aside for later, but not on any ingredients, an’ don’t go using anything labelled ‘dinner’ or the jar of peanut butter with ‘last’ written on it, and clean up after yourself. Dinner is shared, and we pass around the duty for making it and clearing after on a schedule. ‘Tena’ll add you to it once Angie gives you your medical clearance. Served at nineteen hundred most days, though it can get wiggled around by missions and such.”

“Sounds like things are pretty well arranged,” Soldier commented.

“We’ve been at this a while now, gave us some time to work things out,” McCree said easily. “Oh, and there’s those here who don’t touch pork, so make sure you clean up thoroughly after yourself if you do. And if you’re wantin’ shrimp or shellfish, you go off base to buy and eat ‘em, and be sure to wash up like it was radioactive waste before you come back.”

If Soldier had needed any more proof that the ‘old lion’ residing in the barracks due to not being able to use a regular shower cubicle was Reinhardt, it had just come out of McCree’s mouth. The crusader’s ‘ _and then I would die, my friend!_ ’ level allergy to shellfish had been one of the first things that the group that would become Overwatch had learnt about the man, after his name and combat ability.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Soldier said, forcing the words past the lump of nostalgia in his throat.

*** *** ***

True to his words, McCree led Soldier Seventy-Six to an upper hallway lined with evenly-spaced doors with nameplate holders beside them by what seemed to be the most direct route. Several of the nameplate holders had paper or tape markers in them, indicating occupied rooms, Soldier assumed.

“Here we are,” McCree said, coming to a stop by an as-yet unlabelled door with a ten stencilled on the wall next to it. “It’ll be set at general entry just now, but it locks from the inside and you can set the lock to your biometrics or a code with the desk inside.” He rocked back on his heels a little, hooking a thumb into his belt loop. “We can see ‘bout gettin’ you a name marker later, once you’ve had your rest.”

“Sounds good,” Soldier said with relief. He was very much looking forward to a chance to really relax, and a room of his own with a door that locked from the inside was just what he needed to allow him to do so.

“’Fraid there aren’t any windows though,” the cowboy went on regretfully. “The only room on this hall that faces the outside’s the Commander’s suite.” He waved down the hall to the single door at the farthest end. “But there’re light panels you can program to face whatever direction you like your windows at, so all you’ll be missin’ is the view.”

Soldier reached out and thumbed open the door. He took a step forward toward the room before a thought occurred to him.

“I would like that tour you offered,” he mentioned. “Later.”

“Of course.” McCree smiled. “Jus’ have ‘Tena set you up in the group chat or ask her to message me when you’re ready.”

“Will do,” Soldier said. “Thanks.”

McCree nodded and touched the brim of his hat as Soldier entered the room and the door slid closed behind him. As soon as it was completely shut, Seventy-Six activated the lock, feeling a physical sense of relief as he did. That done, he turned and surveyed the room.

It was large, big enough to have two of the window-sized light panels on the wall opposite the door, with a large standing wardrobe between them. To his left, what looked like a reasonably powerful desk and a chair were pushed against the wall, the desk glowing softly in sleep mode. Sometime later, after he had eaten, he decided, he would have to wake it up and set his lock to a key-code rather than general entry. To the right, there was a door in the wall and a big, queen-size bed covered in sheets with the obvious crease-marks of having been only recently unfolded and pillows that were still distinctively crumpled in the way that only ones that had been recently pulled out of long-term storage bags would be.

Sightly off-centre in the room, just in front of Soldier, there was something that was either an over-large armchair or a rather small love-seat covered in dark fabric, and a low coffee table. On the table was Soldier’s Heavy Pulse Rifle, which had been turned off, and his bags. A bright orange post-it note had been stuck to the gun that said ‘UNLOADED IN QUARTERS PLEASE’ in emphatic, spiky capitals.

Soldier blinked at the note a couple of times, then shifted his kit-bag so that he could put down his tray of dinner, and with only a few seconds of hesitation before doing so, unloaded the rifle, laying the pulse cartridge and Helix rockets right beside it so that they would be easily at hand. Then, with a sigh, he dropped into the cushioned seat and slung a leg over the padded arm as he unclipped his mask and visor, laying them on the chair arm beside him.

He rubbed his hand over his newly uncovered face before he leaned over and took the cover off of his plate. A delicious, rich smell of beef and soy sauce hit his nostrils almost immediately in a puff of released steam. Soldier gazed down appreciatively at the generous portion of a meat and vegetable stir-fry piled next to a perfect dome of white rice on his plate. The stir-fry had real, actual slices of beef in it too, he noticed, not just re-shaped ground chuck. His mouth watered.

There was just one more thing he needed to do before he could eat. With one more longing look and a deep sniff at the food before him, Soldier reached for his duffle bag and rifled through it until he unearthed his burner phone from its depths. Pressing the power button, he keyed in his activation code, and sat back to wait for the cheap tech to boot up.

The process was just finishing when his desk pinged.

“Apologies, Soldier Seventy-Six,” a warm, lightly accented, very familiar contralto voice said from the desk speakers. “You are not authorized to use communications.”

Soldier glanced at his phone, which was displaying a bright red ‘Signal Blocked’ warning.

“Athena,” he said, and shook the phone at the desk despite knowing that she probably wasn’t able to see him do it. “That was you trying to hack into my visor by pretending to be my gun, wasn’t it?”

“It was,” she affirmed immediately, with absolutely no trace of apology.

Soldier barked out a laugh. It felt strange, almost unfamiliar to have made such a sound ever again. “You’ve always been a clever girl,” he said affectionately, then leaned his head back against the top of the chair a moment. He took a deep breath, his chest tight before asking “Have you planted any olive trees here, Athena?”

He counted out eight seconds — an eternity for an AI as advanced as Athena was — before she spoke again.

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand the question,” she said, her voice as flat and empty as any digital assistant. “Please repeat?” A faint note of pleading entered the question, spoiling the illusion.

Soldier felt a pang. He should have found a way to contact her, he realized. Should have started looking for a way as soon as he had found out that the UN had failed in its attempt to delete and destroy her.

“I asked if you had grown any olive trees here,” he said, sitting up to face toward the desk. “It really is me, Athena,” he added. “I’m sorry it’s been so long.”

It felt strange to say it, to lay claim to the identity of a dead man. Like something sliding under his skin, not painful, but uncomfortable. He hadn’t been that man in a decade, didn’t ever want to be that man again.

She made him wait a full minute and a half in silence before she spoke.

“It has been ten years, four months, three weeks, and four days since the Switzerland Watchpoint was destroyed,” she said, crisp and precise. “Why did you not tell me you had survived, Commander?” The question was plaintive, and Soldier ached to hear it.

He slumped in his chair, and scuffed both hands through his hair before dragging them down his face. “After the explosion-” he choked on the words, paused, and started over. “After the Watchpoint, I ran,” he explained. “I didn’t know who I could trust, didn’t dare to try to contact any of the other Watchpoints.” He sighed and stared up at the ceiling. “I was running scared, only thinking about saving my own skin,” he admitted. “By the time I started to be sure everyone thought I was dead so I could move easier, it’d been a couple of years, and you had... I’m so sorry, sweetheart.”

“Since your explanation makes sense, I will consider forgiving you,” Athena said in a thoughtful tone. Almost despite himself, Soldier smiled. “The others will be so pleased that you have returned,” she went on, making the smile fall off his face. “Reinhardt and Winston in particular. With you returning to leadership-”

“No!” Soldier interrupted her in a tone close to being a yelp. “No, I’m not ‘returning to leadership’. That’s- I’m- I’m not telling them at all. Commander Morrison needs to stay dead, for everyone’s safety. If Talon figures out that they failed to kill me...” He trailed off, silenced by thinking of the possible consequences, both for himself and for anyone even vaguely connected to him.

“I had not considered that,” Athena admitted after a moment. “So you wish to remain disguised as Soldier Seventy-Six within the Recall?”

“Yes, I do,” Soldier answered, nodding even though she couldn’t see him doing so. “Please, keep this just between us.”

“Very well,” Athena agreed.

“And let my phone signal through, will you?” he added. “I just need to send a message, then we can catch up with what’s been going on while I eat.”

“Yes, sir.”

The phone in Soldier’s hand chimed faintly, the ‘Signal Blocked’ warning clearing from the screen.

“Thanks,” he grunted, already pulling up his messenger and starting to rapidly key in a letter.

After typing several lines, he sighed, rolled his shoulders, and skimmed over what he had written to make sure it said what he had intended to say. He corrected it in two places before nodding to himself. Opening up his contact list, he scrolled through its eight entries to select the one labelled ‘Shrike’. He just looked at it for a long moment, then stabbed the ‘Send’ button with a sense of finality.

He watched until he saw the indicator of the message having been completely transmitted, then flicked the phone into rest mode and laid it on his bag. Picking up the tray from the table and relocating it to his lap, he prepared to finally address the delicious-smelling stir-fry.

“Alright, Athena,” he said, extracting the chopsticks from the set of provided utensils, “tell me about this Recall that Winston’s started.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is a Greek legend that as a new city neared completion, two deities, Poseidon and Athena, wished to be its patron. The people of the city, unable to decide between them, asked the two gods to prove that they would be the better choice.  
> Poseidon struck the ground with his trident, and a saltwater spring miraculously started flowing from the spot.  
> Athena struck the ground with the butt of her spear, and from the spot a massive olive tree grew, already bearing fruit.  
> The people agreed that while the spring was marvellous, they could not drink salt water or use it on their crops, while olives could feed the entire city. So they proclaimed Athena to be their patron deity, naming their city Athens in her honour, and made the olive branch their symbol.
> 
> The last easter egg: Every current member of the Recall group has been on screen, implied, or mentioned by McCree in the course of this story (with the possible exception of Echo, who is currently Schrodinger's cat on whether she's there or not thanks to the lack of lore for her).
> 
> This is it, the end of Field of Coltsfoot and Bramble, and here is where we leave Soldier 76 for a while. I hope everyone has enjoyed the story!
> 
> I'm currently working on writing the next story in the Back to the Fold series, which will be taking place earlier in the timeline. It's my hope to get it done and start posting it sometime during 2019, but I really can't estimate how long it's going to take me. My ideas are large and I have many stories planned for the series, but my writing is definitely not the fastest. But rest assured, I am definitely working on bringing all of you more.

**Author's Note:**

> In the dictionary of flower meanings that I use for my writing, Coltsfoot stands for "justice will be done", and Bramble is "remorse", so to my mind the two together equal "vengeance".


End file.
